Emoticon

This article contains Unicode emoticons or emojis. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of the intended characters.

An emoticon (/əˈmoʊtəkɒn/, ə-MOH-tə-kon, rarely /ɪˈmɒtɪkɒn/, ih-MOTT-ih-kon),^[1][2][3][4] short for emotion icon,^[5] is a pictorial representation of a facial expression using characters—usually punctuation marks, numbers and letters—to express a person's feelings, mood or reaction, without needing to describe it in detail.

ASCII 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 Scott Fahlman, who proposed what came to be known as "smileys"—:-) and :-(—in a message on the bulletin board system (BBS) of Carnegie Mellon University in 1982. In Western countries, emoticons are usually written at a right angle to the direction of the text. Users from Japan popularized a kind of emoticon called kaomoji, using Japanese's larger character sets. This style arose on ASCII NET of Japan in 1986.^[6][7] They are also known as verticons (from vertical emoticon) due to their readability without rotations.^[8] 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 ASCII art with actual emoticon icons or designs. One term used to define these type of emoticons compared to ASCII was portrait emoticons, as portrait emoticons are meant to resemble a face from the front like a portrait painting. The use of these emoticons became prevalent when SMS mobile text messaging and the Internet became widespread in the late 1990s, emoticons became increasingly popular and were commonly used in texting, Internet forums and emails. Over time, the designs became more elaborate and emoticons such as 🙂 by Unicode 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 The Smiley Company stating in interviews that emoticons now allow for greater emotional understanding in writing when emoticons are used.^[9][10] Emoticons were the precursors to modern emojis not just for facial expressions, but also replacing categories like weather, sports and animals.