The ‘tears of joy’ and the shrug emoji are among the most popular ways phone users in the capital express themselves, the founder of Emojipedia has revealed.

Jeremy Burge, who runs Emojipedia, this week told the Evening Standard the top 10 emoticons used by Londoners.

Other favourites include a heart, fire, thinking face, a Union Jack, smirking face, winking face and party popper. The data is based on web traffic to his website, which last month had 19 million views.

The 32-year-old, from west London, told the Standard: “Some things are really hard to say and sending a love heart can sometimes show way more than I could say in a few lines of text. I feel emojis are helping us be clearer with our online communications.”

Now there are some 2,200 of the ideograms in Emojipedia’s growing library.

In 2015, new skin colours were added and this year 56 emojis due for release by the Unicowde Consortium industry body include a breastfeeding mother, a woman in a hijab and a “gender-inclusive” child, adult and older adult.

One of the biggest complaints is the lack of redhead emojis – which Mr Burge is looking to roll out soon.

He said: “It’s challenging because it’s hard for a phone company to add too many emojis because the RAM needed for the emoji font is really quite big.”