Emojis are useful not just because they are colorful, and not just because they are fun, but also because they can be, at times, helpfully ambiguous. Want to convey a kind of non-committal enthusiasm to a friend’s proposal that Saturday end in “Board Game Night”? A💃will help you out. Want to convey slightly less enthusiasm for the idea? A 🙇 might be in order.

For the recipient of these emoji, however, the ambiguity can be slightly less useful. Does a Dancing Lady mean “Yes! I’d love to spend my Saturday playing Settlers of Catan!” or does it mean “I am saucily sashaying away from your suggestion,” or does it mean, simply, “No, let’s go dancing on Saturday”? How are you supposed to tell the difference?

Instagram, which has made use of emoji since its launch, is offering some insight to the emoji-confused and/or -curious. The software engineer Thomas Dimson recently shared the results of an algorithm developed in part to show the correlation between text and emoji. (The findings below are based on the “angle,” or cosine similarity, between a given emoji and the words that accompanied it in Instagram captions and comments.)

Some of the words used in proximity to the emoji correlate fairly directly to what the images would seem to convey. The most-used emoji, 😂, correlated with “lol” and its many variations: “lolol,” “lmao,” “lololol,” “lolz,” “lmfao,” “lmaoo,” “lolololol,” “ahahah,” “ahahha,” “loll,” “ahaha,” “ahah,” “lmfaoo,” “ahha,” “lmaooo,” “lolll,” “lollll,” “ahahaha,” “ahhaha,” “lml,” and “lmfaooo.” The second-most-used, 😍, correlated with “beautifull” [sic], “gawgeous,” “gorgeous,” “perfff,” “georgous,” “gorgous,” “hottt,” “goregous,” “cuteeee,” “beautifullll,” “sexyyyy,” “perffff,” and “hawttt.” The 👍, ranking 9th in emoji usage, correlated with “#keepitup,” “#fingerscrossed,” “aswell,” “#impressed,” “#yourock,” “#greatjob,” “bud,” “#goodjob,” “#proudofyou,” “#goodluck,” and the slightly more surprising “haha” and “lol.” And 😭(11th in emoji usage) correlated with “ugh,” in several forms, along with “wahhhh,” “rn,” “oml,” “omgg,” “omfg,” “omf,” “whyyy,” and the ever-popular “lol.”