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)

Many emoticons redirect here. For the list, see

Not to be confused with

, or

"O.O" redirects here. For other uses, see

and

This article contains

Without proper

, you may see

instead of the

intended characters.

An emoticon portraying a

smiling face

Examples of

smileys

emoticon

(

, rarely

;

of emotion and icon

) is a pictorial representation of a

using

—usually

and

—to

express a person's feelings, mood or reaction, without needing to describe it in

detail.

emoticons can be traced back hundreds of years with various one-off uses. The

protocol as a way to use them to communicate emotion in conversations is credited to

computer scientist

, who proposed what came to be known as "

"—

:-

)

and

:-(

—in a message on the

(BBS) of

in 1982. In Western countries, emoticons are usually written at a right angle to the

direction of the text.

Users from

popularized a kind of emoticon called

using

. This style arose on ASCII NET of Japan in

1986.

They are also known as

verticons

(from

vertical emoticon

) due to their

readability without rotations.

This is often seen as the 1st generation of emoticons.

The second generation began when computing became more common in the west, and people

began replacing the previous

with actual emoticon icons or designs. One term used to define these types of

emoticons compared to ASCII was portrait emoticons, as portrait emoticons are meant to resemble a face from the front

like a

. The use of these emoticons became prevalent when

mobile text messaging and the

became widespread in the late 1990s, emoticons became increasingly popular and were commonly used in

and

. Over time, the designs became more elaborate and emoticons such as 🙂 by

became commonly

referred to as Emoticons. They have played a significant role in communication as technology for communication

purposes advanced and increased in use. Emoticons today convey non-verbal cues of language, such as facial expressions

but also hand gestures, with

stating in interviews that emoticons now allow for greater emotional

understanding in writing when emoticons are used.

Emoticons were the precursors to modern

not just for

facial expressions, but also replacing categories like weather, sports and animals.

History

[

]

ASCII art and faces (pre-1981)

[

]

Cover of the French magazine

, text of a legal ruling

against the magazine in the shape

of a

, 1834

The use of typographic symbols to represent facial expression can be observed as

early as

, where

employs the word "omo" as a preemoticon

representation of the human face. The two letters "o" signify sunken eyes, while the

letter "m" forms the angular outlines of the eyelids, nose, and cheeks, depicting

an emaciated face marked by hunger and thirst.

Their sockets were like rings without the gems;

Whoever in the face of men reads 'omo'

Might well in these have recognised the 'm.'

—

Purgatorio

XXIII. 31-33

In 1648, poet

wrote, "Tumble me down, and I will sit Upon my ruins, (smiling yet:)." Herrick's work

predated any other recorded use of

as a smiling face by around 200 years. However, experts doubted the

inclusion of the

in the poem was deliberate and if it was meant to represent a smiling face. English professor

Alan Jacobs argued that "punctuation, in general, was unsettled in the seventeenth century ... Herrick was unlikely to

have consistent punctuational practices himself, and even if he did he couldn't expect either his printers or his

readers to share them."

17th century typography practice often placed colons and semicolons within parentheses,

including 14 instances of "

" in

's 1653

Plain Scripture Proof of Infants Church-membership and

Baptism

Precursors to modern emoticons have existed since the 19th century.

The

National Telegraphic Review and

Operators Guide

in April 1857 documented the use of the number 73 in

to express "love and kisses"

(later

reduced to the more formal "

").

Dodge's Manual

in 1908 documented the reintroduction of "love and kisses"

as the number 88. New Zealand academics Joan Gajadhar and John Green comment that both

are

more succinct than modern abbreviations such as

Transcript of

speech in 1862

The transcript of one of

's speeches in 1862 recorded the audience's

reaction as: "(applause and laughter ;)".

There has been some debate whether

the glyph in Lincoln's speech was a

, a legitimate punctuation construct or the

first emoticon.

Linguist Philip Seargeant argues that it was a simple

error.

"Typographical art" published in

the March 5, 1881, issue of

Kurjer

Warszawski

Emoticons in the satirical

magazine

on March 30, 1881

Before March 1881, the examples of "typographical art" appeared in at least three

newspaper articles, including

(published in

) from March 5,

1881, using punctuation to represent the emotions of joy, melancholy, indifference

and astonishment.

Telegraphische Zeichenkunst

the German

Deutsche Postzeitung

November 16, 1896

In a 1912 essay titled "For Brevity and Clarity", American author

suggested facetiously

that a bracket could be used to represent a smiling

face, proposing "an improvement in punctuation" with which writers could convey

, loud or immoderate laughter: "it is written thus ‿ and presents a

smiling mouth. It is to be appended, with the full stop, to every jocular or

ironical sentence".

In a 1936

article, writer Alan Gregg

proposed combining brackets with various other

to represent

various moods. Brackets were used for the sides of the mouth or cheeks, with other

punctuation used between the brackets to display various emotions:

(-)

for a smile,

(--)

(showing more "teeth") for laughter,

(#)

for a frown and

(*)

for a

An instance of text characters representing a sideways smiling and frowning face could be found in the

on March 10, 1953, promoting the film

Lili

starring

The September 1962 issue of

included an article titled "Typewri-toons". The piece, featuring typewriter-

generated artwork credited to "Royal Portable", was entirely made up of repurposed typography, including a capital

letter P having a bigger 'bust' than a capital I, a lowercase b and d discussing their pregnancies, an

on top

of a letter to indicate the letter had just come inside from snowfall, and a classroom of lowercase n's interrupted by

a lowercase h "raising its hand".

A further example attributed to a

columnist appeared in a

1967 article in

, using a

and

to represent a

—

Prefiguring the modern "smiley" emoticon,

writer

told an interviewer from

in 1969, "I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile—some sort of concave mark, a

supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question."

In the 1970s, the

computer system was launched. It was one of the first computers used throughout educational

and professional institutions, but rarely used in a residential setting.

On the computer system, a student at the

developed pictograms that resembled different smiling faces.

and

stated this likely took place in 1972, and they claimed these to be the first emoticons.

ASCII emoticons - First generation (1982–mid-1990s)

[

]

In 1982,

computer scientist

is generally credited with the protocol of communicating and

portraying emotion in written text.

The use of

symbols, a standard set of codes representing

typographical marks, was essential to allow the symbols to be displayed on any computer.

In Carnegie Mellon's

, Fahlman proposed colon–

–right bracket

:-)

as a label for "attempted humor" to try to

solve the difficulty of conveying

in plain text.

Fahlman sent the following message

after

an incident where a humorous warning about a

spill in an elevator was misunderstood as serious:

19-Sep-82 11:44    Scott E  Fahlman             :-)

From: Scott E  Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways.  Actually, it is probably more economical to mark

things that are NOT jokes, given current trends.  For this, use

:-(

Within a few months, the smiley had spread to the

[

]

and

[

]

Other suggestions on the forum included an

*

and an

&

, the

latter meant to represent a person doubled over in laughter,

as well as a

%

and a

#

Scott Fahlman suggested that not only could his emoticon communicate

, but also replace language.

Since the 1990s, emoticons (colon, hyphen and bracket) have become integral to digital communications,

and have

inspired a variety of other emoticons,

including the "winking" face using a

;-)

XD

, a

representation of the

and the acronym "

In 1996,

was established by Nicolas Loufrani and his father Franklin as a way of commercializing

the

trademark. As part of this, The Smiley Dictionary website was launched and had a focus on ASCII emoticons,

where available emoticons were catalogued. In total more than 500 were recorded. Notably this catalog removed the dash

( - ) for a nose and just had eyes and a mouth. The reasoning behind this was to make the ASCII emoticons more like

the

, which resulted in :) instead of :-). The shortening or redesign of ASCII emoticons has not been covered in

enough depth to know where the shorter versions originated, but The Smiley Dictionary could have as a minimum

influenced the way ASCII emoticons are used today.

[

]

Many other people did similar to Loufrani from 1995

onwards, including David Sanderson creating the book

Smileys

in 1997. James Marshall also hosted an online collection

of ASCII emoticons that he completed in 2008.

In 1998, the book Le Dico Smiley was also published.

A researcher at

surveyed the emoticons used in four million

messages and found that the

smiling emoticon without a hyphen "nose"

:)

was much more common than the original version with the hyphen

:-)

Linguist

argues that this represents a shift in usage by younger users as a form of

rejecting a standard usage in order to demonstrate in-group membership.

Portrait emoticons - Second generation (1990s–present)

[

]

Nicolas Loufrani began to use the basic text designs and turned them into graphical representations, which are now

known as portrait emoticons. His designs were registered at the

in 1997 and appeared

online as

in 1998.

For ASCII emoticons that did not exist to convert into graphical form, Loufrani

also backward engineered new ASCII emoticons from the graphical versions he created. These were the first graphical

representations of ASCII emoticons.

Not only did these portrait emoticons portray existing and new ASCII emoticons,

but also new features were added, such as

in the form of white gloves. These have since become

standalone

along with other emojis that have replaced words in text communication. In 2001, he published his

emoticon set online on the Smiley Dictionary.

This dictionary included 640 different smiley icons

and was

published as a book called

Dico Smileys

in 2002.

In 2017, British magazine

The Drum

referred to Loufrani as the

"godfather of the emoji" for his work in the field.

The first American company to take notice of

was

beginning in 2007. In August 2007, a team made up of

and his colleagues Kat Momoi and Markus Scherer began petitioning the

an attempt to standardise the emoji.

The UTC, having previously deemed emoji to be out of scope for Unicode, made

the decision to broaden its scope to enable compatibility with the Japanese cellular carrier formats which were

becoming more widespread.

Peter Edberg and Yasuo Kida joined the collaborative effort from

shortly

after, and their official UTC proposal came in January 2009 with 625 new emoji characters.

Notably the move

included a large set of emoticons, designed in an emoji-style but representing different emotions.

In recent times, emoticons,

and

have often become intertwined and confused.

represent the

largest set of graphical communication, but they often include portrait emoticons. In fact, the majority of the most

commonly used Emoji are emoticons (because they represent an emotion). In 2024, the

reported that 2 of the top 3

emojis were portrait emoticons.

On September 23, 2021, it was announced that

was holding an auction for the original emoticons he

created in 1982. The auction was held in

, United States, and sold the two designs as

The online auction ended later that month, with the originals selling for

237,500.

A year later in

2022,

auctioned off an

of 42 original graphical emoticon on

. The proceeds of

the sale went to the company's non-profit arm, Smiley Movement.

In some

, certain operators are known informally by their emoticon-like appearance. This

includes the

<=>

(a comparison), the

<>

(for type hinting) and the

?:

(a shortened

Styles

[

]

This section

needs additional citations for

Please help

in this section. Unsourced

material may be challenged and removed.

(

October 2021

)

(

)

Western

[

]

Usually, emoticons in Western style have the eyes on the left, followed by the nose and the mouth. It is commonly

placed at the end of a sentence, replacing the full stop. The two-character version

:)

, which omits the nose, is very

popular. The most basic emoticons are relatively consistent in form, but some can be rotated (making them tiny

). There are also some variations to emoticons to get new definitions, like changing a character to express

another feeling. For example,

:(

indicates sadness and

:((

indicates a more extreme sadness. Weeping can be written

:'(

. A blush can be expressed as

:">

. Others include wink

;)

, a grin

:D

:P

for tongue out, and smug

:->

; they

can be used to

a flirting or joking tone, or may be implying a

in the sentence preceding it.

;P

, such as when

. An often used combination is also

<3

for a

and

</3

for a broken heart.

:O

is also sometimes used to depict shock.

:/

is used to depict melancholy, disappointment or disapproval.

:|

may

be used to depict a neutral face.

A broad grin is sometimes shown with crinkled eyes to express further amusement;

XD

and the addition of further "D"

letters can suggest laughter or extreme amusement, e.g.,

XDDDD

. The "3" in

X3

and

:3

represents a cat's mouth.

equal sign is often used for the eyes in place of the colon, seen as

=)

. It has become more acceptable to omit the

hyphen, whether a colon or an equal sign is used for the eyes.

One linguistic study has indicated that the use of a

nose in an emoticon may be related to the user's age, with younger people less likely to use a nose.

Some variants are also more common in certain countries due to

. For example, the smiley

=)

may

occur in

marks are sometimes used. The letters

Ö

and

Ü

can be seen as emoticons, as the

upright versions of

:O

(meaning that one is surprised) and

:D

(meaning that one is very happy), respectively. In

countries where the

is used, the right parenthesis

)

is used as a smiley. Multiple parentheses

))))

are used to express greater happiness, amusement or laughter. The colon is omitted due to being in a lesser-known

position on the

. The '

' emoticon,

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

uses the glyph

from the Japanese

writing system.

Kaomoji (Japan ASCII movement)

[

]

Main article:

Kaomoji are often seen as the Japanese development of emoticons that is separate to the

movement, which

started in 1982. In 1986, a designer began to use brackets and other

to form faces. Over time,

they became more often differentiated from each other, although both use ASCII characters. However, more westernised

Kaomojis have dropped the brackets, such as

owo

uwu

and

TwT

, popularised in internet subcultures such as the

and

A kaomoji painting in Japan

2channel

[

]

Users of the Japanese discussion board

, in particular, have developed a

variety emoticons using characters from various scripts, such as

, as in

(for a look of disapproval, disbelief or confusion). Similarly, the letter ರೃ was used in emoticons to

represent a monocle and ಥ to represent a tearing eye. They were picked up by

and spread to other Western sites

soon after. Some have become characters in their own right like

Korean

[

]

, emoticons use Korean

letters, and the Western style is rarely used.

The structures of Korean

and Japanese emoticons are somewhat similar, but they have some differences. Korean style contains Korean

(letters) instead of other characters.

The consonant jamos

ㅅ

ㅁ

ㅂ

can be used as the mouth or nose component and

ㅇ

ㅎ

ㅍ

for the eyes. Using

quotation marks

"

and apostrophes

'

are also commonly used combinations. Vowel jamos such as ㅜ and ㅠ can depict a

crying face. Example:

ㅜㅜ

(same function as T in Western style). Sometimes ㅡ (not an

"—", but a vowel jamo),

a comma (

,

) or an

(

_

) is added, and the two character sets can be mixed together, as in

ㅠ.ㅡ

ㅡ^ㅜ

and

ㅜㅇㅡ

Also, semicolons and

are commonly used in Korean emoticons; semicolons can mean sweating, examples of it

are

-;/

--^

and

-_-;;

Chinese ideographic

[

]