Emoticon

   

An emoticon, also called a smiley, is a sequence of printable characters such as :) or :-) that is intended to represent a human facial expression and convey an emotion. Emoticons are a form of paralanguage commonly used in email messages, in online bulletin boards, or in chat rooms. The word emoticon is a portmanteau based on emotion and icon.

A similar portmanteau, verticon (based on vertical and icon), is sometimes used when referring to the East Asian style of emoticon.

History

The first known instance of using text characters to represent a sideways smiling (and frowning) face is in a newspaper advertisement in the New York Herald Tribune, March 10, 1953, on page 20, columns 4–6. Promoting the film Lili, starring Leslie Caron, the ad read as follows: 

Today

You'll laugh :)
You'll cry :(
You'll love (Heart-shaped face)
_Lili_

The film opened nationwide, so the ad may have run in many newspapers.

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 World Wide Web (such as Connected Earth (http://www.connected-earth.com/Journeys/Frombuttonstobytes/ComputerNetworks/Thegrowthofe-mail/Firstemoticon/firstemoticon(1979).htm)) 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 hyphen 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. 

19-Sep-82 11:44    Scott E  Fahlman             :-)
From: Scott E  Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>

I propose that the following character sequence [be used] 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

:-(

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.

Purposes

Emoticons have developed over the years as a replacement for facial expressions and other emotional cues lacking in text-only communication; the goal is to avoid misunderstandings due to the lack of contextual information. Many books have been written on this subject, with voluminous listings 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 (IM) tools perform such replacement automatically when receiving a message. An August 2004 issue of the Risks Digest (comp.risks on USENET) pointed out a problem 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. [1] (http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/23.48.html#subj5)

Western style

Traditionally, the emoticon in Western style is written from left to right, the way one reads and writes in most Western cultures. Thus, most commonly, you'll see the eyes on the left, followed by the nose and mouth. To more easily recognise them, tilt your head towards your left shoulder (or occasionally towards your right shoulder if the "top" of the emoticon is towards the right).

The smile is represented with a basic smiley :-). The colon represents the eyes, the hyphen is for the nose, and the parenthesis is for the mouth.

Often the symbol for the nose is omitted or replaced with another symbol, for example :) or :^) or :o). Also, the colon is sometimes replaced with the equals sign, =), in which case the nose is almost always omitted (so one would not see =-), for example).

Basic examples

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. 

 :-)                smile
 :-(                frown: sadness or sympathy
 :-/                somewhat unhappy/discontent
 ;-)                wink
 :-D                wide grin
 :-P or :-p         tongue sticking out: joke or sarcasm
 B-) or 8-)         has (sun)glasses: looking cool
 :-o or :-O         expresses surprise
 :-x                "I shouldn't have said that"
 :'-(               shedding a tear of beauty / sadness
 :o) or :o(         larger nose, usually means tongue-in-cheek
 >:-) or }:-)       lowered eyebrows, evil or mean, a devil
 0:-)               halo over the head, good or benevolent, an angel, innocent
=|:-)=              A smiley with the beard and stovepipe hat of Abraham Lincoln. 
                     Intended to indicate honesty ("Honest Abe").

Variants

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 press release (http://www.despair.com/demotivators/frownonthis.html) in which it was announced that the company would be suing "over 7 million internet users" who had infringed their trademark. They subsequently issued another press release (http://www.despair.com/demotivators/acompromise.html) a month later in response to the reaction their claim had generated.


Head and hands emoticons

These emoticons aren't rotated, they include the letter "o" for a human head, and slashes and backslashes for the arms. 

o/ or \o         waving
o\ or /o         scratching one's head
/o\              despair
\o/              joy

East Asian style

Users from East Asia popularized a style of emoticons known as verticons (Japanese: 顔文字, kaomoji; literally, "face mark"), 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: ^^. More recent examples of kaomoji contain Cyrillic and other foreign letters to create even more complicated expressions nearing ASCII art's level of complexity.

Basic examples

Note that for most of these, it is possible to use a period for a mouth (^.^) or leave out the mouth entirely (^^). 

 ^_^                          smiley
 ~_~                          content
 `_^ or ^_~                   wink
 >_<                          angry, frustrated
 ^o^                          excited
 ^o^v                         peace
 \^o^/                        very excited (raising hands into the air)
 -_-                          annoyed (trying to hide annoyance), also sleeping (eyes shut)
 ¬_¬                          focused at a particular person
 ;_; or ;.;                   crying
 o_O or O_o                   confused surprise (one eye raised)
 >_0 or 0_<                   flinching, ouch!
 >_> or <_<                   yeah, right...
 ._.                          small - hiding, discrete, intimidated
 $_$                          thinking about money
 x_x                          dead or knocked out

Complex examples 

=^.^=                 blushing, or a cat face (mischievous)
~~~~>_<~~~~           weeping horribly
^_^;                  small sweatdrop (embarrassed)
/*^_^*\ or /°^_^°\    Sailor Moon
<(^_^)>,(>^_^)>, etc..Kirby, often repeated to indicate dancing.  
<(¬_¬)>               focused at a particular person with ear-phones
\(^o^)/               translated as "Wa--i!" or "Wow!" (very excited) - historically was "banzai!"
                       The '\' & '/' are arms in this case.

Other 

<3                           Heart shape ( ♥ )
---{-@                       Rose (variants are common)
<><                          Jesus Fish

Face symbols in Unicode

Unicode includes several symbols that may be used as emoticons (although few people actually use them). See the table below:


namecharactercodepoint
white frowning face☹U+2639
white smiling face☺U+263A
black smiling face☻U+263B


Note that the words black and white in the above examples are printing terms meaning roughly filled in and not filled in, respectively.

See also

External links

Japanese emoticons



da:Emoticon de:Emoticon es:Emoticono eo:Mieno fi:Hymiö fr:Emoticon it:Emoticon ko:이모티콘 nl:Emoticon ja:顔文字 pl:Emotikon sv:Uttryckssymbol zh:表情符号

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