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An emoticon, also called a smiley, is a sequence of printable characters such as this " :) " used to represent a human face and express an emotion. Emoticons are a form of paralanguage commonly used in email messages, in bulletin boards, or in chat. "Emoticon" is a portmanteau word based on emotion and icon.
A similar portmanteau, verticon (based on vertical and icon), is sometimes used when referring to the Japanese style of emoticon.
The first known instance of using text characters to represent a sideways smiling (and frowning) face is in an ad in the New York Herald Tribune, March 10, 1953, pg. 20, cols. 4-6. The ad was for the film Lili, with the "delightful" Leslie Caron. It stated that the "World Premiere Today" was at the Trans-Lux 52nd on Lexington Avenue. The film opened nationwide, so this ad may have run in many newspapers. The ad read as follows:
In 1963 the smiley face, a yellow button with a smile and two dots representing eyes, was invented by Harvey Ball. Since this smiley face is not created with text characters, it is not considered an emoticon, but it presumably inspired later emoticons.
Several sites on the Web (such as ) assert that Kevin Mackenzie proposed "-)" as a joke marker in April 1979 on a message board called MsgGroup. The idea was to indicate that a message was intended tongue-in-cheek -- the hypen was a tongue, not a nose. Although it has two out of the three characters of the smiley, its intended interpretation was different and it doesn't appear to have inspired the later smileys.
The creator of the original ASCII emoticons ":-)" and ":-(", with a specific suggestion that they be used to express emotion, was Scott Fahlman; the original proposal made by Fahlman on CMU CS general board on September 19, 1982 (at 11:44) was retrieved from old backup tapes on September 10, 2002 by Jeff Baird.
The earliest known non-ASCII emoticons were used in the PLATO IV program as early as 1972, which allowed users to type multiple text characters "on top" of each other. Many combinations of ordinary text characters were known to produce face-like patterns, which were used as emoticons.
Emoticons have developed over the years as a replacement for facial expressions and emotions, as a way to cope with the limitations of being forced to communicate in text only, without misunderstandings due to the lack of information. Books have been written on this subject, with endless listings of a multitude of emoticons.
In an Internet forum, emoticons are often automatically replaced with small corresponding images. In some versions of Microsoft Word, the AutoCorrect feature recognizes basic smilies such as :) and :(.
Many popular instant-messaging tools perform such replacement automatically when receiving a message. An August, 2004 issue of the USENET Risks digest pointed out an issue with such features, which are not under the sender's control. "It's hard to know in advance what character-strings will be parsed into what kind of unintended image. A colleague was discussing his 401(k) plan with his boss, who happens to be female, via instant messaging. He discovered, to his horror, that the boss's instant-messaging client was rendering the "(k)" as a big pair of red smoochy lips."
To more easily recognise them, put your head on either your left or right shoulder, depending on whether the "top" of the emoticon is on the left or the right.
The smile is represented with a basic smiley :-). The colon represents the eyes, the dash is for the nose, and the parenthesis is for the mouth. This order is for the right-handed; left-handed smileys are turned the other way.
Traditionally, the emoticon in Western style is written from left to right: exactly how one reads and write in Western culture. Thus, most commonly, you'll see the eyes on the left, followed by the nose and mouth.
Often, the symbol for the nose is omitted or replaced with another symbol, e.g. :) or :o). Also, the colon is replaced with the equal sign, e.g. =) (in which case the nose is always omitted, so one would never see =-) or similar).
The following examples all use the basic form, but each of them can be transformed to be rotated, to lose the dash and/or to replace the eyes symbol. Lately it has become common to leave the dash away.
There are endless possibilities, because people are very good at creating and interpreting pictures as faces. See ASCII art.
Some variants are also more common in certain countries because of reasons like keyboard layouts, for example the smiley =) is common in Scandinavia and Finland where the keys for = and ) are placed right beside each other and both need the use of shift key.
A few people turn the smiley around, a "left handed" smiley (: This left-handed smiley can sometimes cause miscommunication though, since some hardcore netaddicts tend to drop the : representing the eyes [leaving ) instead of :) ] so what was intended to be a smile could be interpreted as a frown.
There also exists the use of umlauts to achieve emoticons that aren't tilted to the side. For example, Ö is the upright version of :O (meaning that one is alarmed).
As more of a joke than anything – but also as a political statement – "frownies", the symbol :-( , were trademarked by Despair, Inc. in U.S. Trademark Serial No. 75502288, Registration No. 2347676. The trademark applies only to "Printed matter namely, greeting cards, posters and art prints". In January 2001 Despair issued a satirical in which it was announced that the company would be suing "over 7 million internet users" who had infringed their trademark. They subsequently issued a month later in response to the reaction their claim had generated.
These emoticons aren't rotated, they include the letter "o" for a human head, and slashes and backslashes for the arms.
Some users from East Asia, North America and Europe also use verticons, which can be understood without turning one's head to the left. These are usually in the format of *_*, where the asterisks indicate the eyes, and the central character, usually an underscore, is the mouth. When a period is used for the mouth, it is often meant to make the person look cuter, especially for women. The mouth can also be left out entirely. These style of faces roughly resembles the style commonly found in Japanese Anime and Manga cartoons.
The Japanese language is usually encoded using double-byte character codes. As a result there is a bigger variety of characters that can be used in emoticons, many of which cannot be reproduced in ASCII. It is noted historically, that the Japanese style used the parenthesis as the face, for example: (^_^) Complete shorthand in Japanese style would be something like: ^^
Unicode includes several symbols that may be used as emoticons (although few people actually use them). See the table below:
| name | character | codepoint |
|---|---|---|
| white frowning face | ☹ | U+2639 |
| white smiling face | ☺ | U+263A |
| black smiling face | ☻ | U+263B |
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