We’re a straightforward bunch.

In honour of #WorldEmojiDay, July 17th, Twitter has just released the Top Most Tweeted Emojis… and as a nation, we are heavily reliant on the thumbs up/winky face combo.

A whopping 250 million emojis are sent out every month on Twitter (3.2 billion emojis per year) but in Ireland, the top five are pretty predictable…

The use of emojis on Twitter still corresponds to the basic idea of the Japanese inventor Shigetaka Kurita, who developed the first 176 emojis.

He designed them in 1998 to express feelings and emotions in a character – creating a growing use due to the character limits of SMS. Nowadays, there are an incredible 2,789 Emojis available.

If you’d like to expand your emoji vocabulary, on Twitter there are some very special emojis that only appear when entering certain hashtags:

Meanwhile, more than 70 new emoji characters are coming to iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac later this year in a free software update.

The new emoji designs include even more hair options to better represent people with red hair, grey hair and curly hair, a new emoji for bald people, and new smiley faces that bring more expression to Messages with a cold face, party face, pleading face and a face with hearts.

Joining the growing list of animals represented on the emoji keyboard are beautifully designed characters for the kangaroo, peacock, parrot and lobster, with the addition of new food emoji for mango, lettuce, cupcake, moon cake and other popular items.