Emojis used in messages on all sorts of software platforms have become so popular that there’s been a day celebrating them for six years now. World Emoji Day falls on July 17, and companies use the day to announce new ‘emoji’ releases.

American multinational company Apple said on Friday that it is previewing a selection of 117 new emojis which will be released this fall season.

Celebrating World Emoji Day on Friday, the iPhone maker revealed the new emoji designs which will come with a free software update for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch.

The new designs of emoji include bubble tea, pinched fingers, boomerang, transgender symbol, dodo, beaver, nesting dolls, coin, anatomical heart, lungs, ninja, and tamale.

Apple typically adds new emoji just after the release of the new operating systems in the fall.

In 2017, a feature called Animoji was added by Apple to map popular emoji characters to a person's face. Later this was expanded to 'Memoji' - which lets you customise the Animoji to create an avatar that looks like you. A set of new Memoji too have been released by Apple.

Many companies have been making use of the World Emoji Day to attract customers. The Tata group put out some emoji encoding which would give important tips for staying safe.

Ericsson tweeted, "Did you know that #WorldEmojiDay is July 17 because that's the date displayed on the calendar emoji? See for yourself!"

World Emoji Day was founded in 2014 by Jeremy Burge, who is also founder of Emojipedia, emoji reference website. The World Emoji Day website says about choosing July 17, “This is the date that iCal for Mac was first announced at MacWorld Expo in 2002. We now use this for World Emoji Day.”

Companies use World Emoji Day to launch emoji-related promotions, and host emoji events, the website adds.

There is a Twitter handle called World Emoji Day for the 'annual celebration of emojis by 'Emojipedia'.

(With IANS input)