The most-used emoji globally last year was one called 'Face with Tears of Joy,' which was posted 6.5 billion times on Twitter alone, suggesting uncontrollable laughter is what we crave.

"In 2015 the emoji dominated Twitter ," according to German communications agency Faktor3.

"Emojis have been used billions of times this year. That's an average of about one emoji per person on the planet."

Britain's Oxford English Dictionary picked the same happy-crying emoji as ‘Word of the Year’ in 2015 and had to defend itself from critics who argued that a picture could not be a word.

The final emoji rankings issued by Twitter were: 1) Face with Tears of Joy, 2) Face with Heart Eyes, 3) Sobbing Face, 4) Grinning Face, 5) Heart Emoji, 6) Pink Hearts Emoji, 7) Sparkling Stars Emoji, 8) Blowing Kiss Emoji, 9) Clapping Hands Emoji, and 10) Fire Emoji.

- dpa