Temporal Drift of Emoji Meanings in GitHub Commit Messages
Tracking how often developers use emojis in GitHub commit messages and how their usage changes month by month.
- Observations
- 12
- Tracking since
- Last updated
Emoji count per month
Number of emoji-like characters (non-ASCII) found in commit messages per month
| When | Emoji count per month |
|---|---|
| 24 count | |
| 24 count |
Emoji usage entropy per month
Shannon entropy (base 2) of emoji-like character distribution in commit messages per month
| When | Emoji usage entropy per month |
|---|---|
| 1.89 bits | |
| 1.89 bits |
About this data
This page measures the monthly frequency of individual emoji that appear in public GitHub commit messages. It also calculates the Shannon entropy of emoji usage each month to gauge the diversity and unpredictability of emoji choice. The data are gathered by scraping commit messages from openly available repositories, filtering for Unicode emoji characters, and aggregating counts per calendar month. Tracking these metrics shows how developers’ expressive habits evolve, revealing shifts in sentiment or status that standard sentiment‑analysis tools miss. Because emoji meanings can drift over time, the dataset offers a unique view of informal communication in software development.
Sources
Every figure on this page was read from these pages.
Why this isn't published anywhere else
No live dashboard, recurring report, or public dataset specifically tracking temporal drift of emoji meanings in GitHub commit messages was found; existing resources are either generic emoji semantic change tools, Twitter-based analyses, or blog posts.
Uniqueness score 0.98 — assessed against live web search results when this subject was created.