What Is The Peach Emoji Used For

How Nosotros Actually Apply The Peach

Dec xvi, 2016 • 3 min read

Apple recently came nether fire for proposing a change to the 🍑 peach emoji that made it look more than fruit-similar and less butt-similar.

"What's happening to emojis represents the worst kind of gentrification of the internet," charged Buzzfeed. Mashable was fifty-fifty more dramatic, exclaiming:

"Apple tree but ruined texting."

While Apple tree shortly retreated, the episode demonstrated the forcefulness of people's feelings about emojis and highlighted how much of their meaning remains personal and subjective.

🍑 Before and afterward #PeachButtGate picture.twitter.com/R6NlkM3G6S
— Emojipedia 📙 (@Emojipedia) November 17, 2016

Nosotros were curious what the information said on the question of fruit vs. barrel and so we turned to Twitter.

Concluding Sunday, Dec. eleven, nosotros used the streaming API to collect a random sample of real time, English language-language tweets mentioning 🍑. Over 12 hours, we collected 1,618 tweets; after removing retweets, we were left with a dataset of 571 tweets.

Although this is a small-scale sample and does not shed calorie-free on how the 🍑 emoji is used in individual messaging, nosotros still notice some interesting trends.

Words in tweets with 🍑

"Like", "ass", "peach", "badgirl", and "booty" round out the top five words in tweets with 🍑.

This suggests that 🍑 is much more likely to have a sexual connotation or be used every bit a autograph for butt, than it is to refer to the actual fruit.

Tin can we quantify how people apply the 🍑?

We took a random sample of 100 tweets from our dataset and manually inspected them to run into what they meant.

We concluded up classifying them into v broad buckets:

33% of tweets use 🍑 as a shorthand for barrel, either literally (i.e. "Accidentally knocked over a lamp with my haul 🍑") or figuratively (i.e. "Finals are nearly to kick my 🍑" or in an specially artistic usage, "Feel like pure arse 🍑").
27% have sexual connotations or include suggestive imagery. These are frequently promotional in nature (i.due east. "Who loves big #booties? 🍑" or "🍑 chimera barrel please follow united states").
xiii% refer to fitness, usually squats (i.e. "Front squat warm ups 🍑" or "@emrata's instagram makes me want to become the gym, not consume chocolate and squat for the rest of my life 🍑").
Only 7% refer to the fruit, almost of which refer to the flavor (i.east. "Holiday shopping on @amazon? Add on a jar of our Salted Caramel Peach 🍑") or the color ("peachy skies 🍑"). Only one% of tweets refer literally to the concrete fruit (i.e. "This weeks fruit is a peach 🍑").
iv% employ 🍑 to signify feeling peachy or more often than not positive (i.due east. "Awwww, I'm shyyyy 🙈🍑❤️ Thankyou so much").
xvi% don't fall into any of the above categories and usually use 🍑 as a random addition to other text.

Let'due south take a moment to highlight the key finding here: as many every bit 93% of tweets with 🍑 have naught to exercise with the actual peach.

This highlights the dynamic and user-determined nature of emojis-every bit-linguistic communication.

While the peach is included in all emoji keyboards among up to 21 other fruits and vegetables, information technology's almost never used in a literal sense.

What other emojis exercise people use with the 🍑?

Here, nosotros find that 8 of the top ten near unremarkably co-occuring emojis are other fruits and vegetables.

While these brand for a pretty chart, closer inspection reveals that most of these are promotional tweets from a flower bot (i.e. "Allow u.s. arrange a smile for you. 🍉🍓🍑🍉🍌🍐🍍🍠🍆").

How neat.

Annotation: please feel nigh welcome to apply whatever of the charts and other images in this article, with a link to this page for attribution.