The Royal Opera House is to use emoji to tell the story of well-known operas and ballets to mark World Emoji Day.

The performing arts venue will use its official Twitter account to post emoji-only messages, while giving away tickets to performances if Twitter followers correctly identify the opera or ballet depicted.

The opera house has partnered with Twitter on the scheme, and said it will post a new emoji opera or ballet message every 30 minutes throughout Monday.

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Emojis (the plural can be either emoji or emojis) have been around since the late 1990s, but 2015 saw their use, and use of the word emoji, increase hugely.

The picture-based animations have grown to become one of the most prominent forms of modern digital communication, the "face with tears of joy" emoji - more commonly known as the crying with laughter emoji, was named the Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year in 2015.

SwiftKey identified that this emoji made up 20 per cent of all the emojis used in the UK in 2015, and 17 per cent of those in the US: a sharp rise from four per cent and nine per cent respectively in 2014.

The word emoji has seen a similar surge: although it has been found in English since 1997, usage more than tripled in 2015 over the previous year according to data from the Oxford Dictionaries Corpus.

An emoji is ‘a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion in electronic communication’; the term emoji is a loanword from Japanese, and comes from e ‘picture’ + moji ‘letter, character’.

The similarity to the English word emoticon has helped its memorability and rise in use, though the resemblance is actually entirely coincidental: emoticon (a facial expression composed of keyboard characters, such as ;), rather than a stylized image) comes from the English words emotion and icon.

The Royal Opera House said it hoped working with the social media giant would help it reach new audiences.

The venue's head of marketing communications, audiences and media, Jeremy Paul said: "We grab any opportunity to tell narratives and teaming up with Twitter means we do this at unprecedented scale.

"It's part of a strategy to pivot into dialogue-platforms like Twitter."

The opera house said it would also use its Instagram and Facebook accounts for "additional activity".

Both social media platforms also support the emoji, as do the world's most prominent mobile phone operating systems, Apple's iOS and Google's Android.

Twitter's UK managing director Dara Nasr said: "Every year we see emojis used billions of times on Twitter and this is such a fantastic and unique way for the Royal Opera House to both reach a new audience and also celebrate World Emoji Day."