An emoticon, also called a smiley, is a sequence of ordinary printable characters, such as :-), xD, d:), -_-, (^_^), :-(, or a small image, intended to represent a human facial expression and convey an emotion. Emoticons are a form of paralanguage commonly used as extended interpunction symbols in e-mail, instant messaging, online chat, bulletin boards and Internet forums; without them simple statements could be misinterpreted. Sometime during 1981, Scott Fahlman (now a Principal Research Scientist in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University), devised a scheme for encoding and conveying one's feelings in small text "glyphs" to overcome this frustration.

The word emoticon is a portmanteau which popular etymology bases 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.

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.

Many variants exist with different symbols substituted for the basic ones. The symbol for the nose is often omitted, for example :) or ;). When the colon is replaced with the equals sign, =), the nose is almost always omitted (so one would not see =-), for example). This is also used to make figures, objects and animals, in other words an art-form.

History

Background

Further information: Harvey Ball, smiley

In 1912 Ambrose Bierce proposed "an improvement in punctuation - the snigger point, or note of cachinnation: it is written thus \___/! and presents, as near as may be, a smiling mouth. It is to be appended, with the full stop, [or exclamation mark as Bierce's later example used] to every jocular or ironical sentence".^[1]

Even then, the idea of codifying emotional content in written or message form was not new. The National Telegraphic Review and Operators Guide in April 1857 documented the use of the number 73 in Morse code to express "love and kisses" (later reduced to the more formal "best regards"). Dodge's Manual in 1908 documented the reintroduction of "love and kisses" as the number 88. Gajadhar and Green comment that both are more succinct than modern abbreviations such as LOL.^[2] (See Morse Code Abbreviations for these and further abbreviations.)

In 1963, the smiley face, a yellow button with two black dots representing eyes and an upturned thick curve representing mouth, was created by freelance artist Harvey Ball. It was realized on order of a large insurance company as part of a campaign to bolster the morale of its employees and soon became a big hit.

This smiley presumably inspired later emoticons; the most basic graphic emoticon depicts in fact a small, yellow, smiley face.

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.

In an 1969-04-16 New York Times interview, Alden Whitman asked writer Vladimir Nabokov: "How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?" Nabokov answered, "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." That interview has been reprinted in the collection of interviews and editorials by Nabokov.^[3]

Several Internet websites —such as Connected Earth— assert that Kevin Mackenzie proposed -) as a joke-marker in April 1979, on a message board called MsgGroup. The idea was to indicate tongue-in-cheek — the hyphen represented a tongue, not a nose. Although it has two out of the three characters of ":-)", its intended interpretation was different and it doesn't appear to have inspired the later smileys.

Creation of :-) and :-(

The creator of the original ASCII emoticons :-) and :-(, with a specific suggestion that they be used to express emotion, was Scott Fahlman; the text of his original proposal, posted to the Carnegie Mellon University computer science general board on 1982-09-19 (11:44), was considered lost for a long time. It was however recovered twenty years later (2002-09-10) by Jeff Baird, from old backup tapes.^[4]

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
        
:-(

Web usage

In Web forums and instant messengers, text emoticons are often automatically replaced with small corresponding images, which came to be called emoticons as well. Similarly, in some versions of Microsoft Word, the Auto Correct feature replaces basic smileys such as :) and :( with a single smiley-like character. Originally, these image emoticons were fairly simple and replaced only the most straightforward and common character sequences, but over time they became so complex that the more specialized emoticons are often input using a menu or popup windows, sometimes listing hundreds of items. Some of these graphical emoticons do not actually represent faces or emotions; for example, an "emoticon" showing a guitar might be used to represent music. Further, some instant messaging software is designed to play a sound upon receiving certain emoticons.

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. ^[5]

Emoticons are also commonly used in online computer games.

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.

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).

Common examples

A list of some of the most common emoticons follows. As displayed here, they all use a relatively consistent form, but each of them can also be transformed by being rotated, having the hyphen omitted, and so on (see Variation below). More comprehensive lists may be found under External links below.

Not all emoticons are meant to be looked at sideways. The following are emoticons that are meant to be looked at without rotation.

Variation

There are endless possibilities, because people are very good at creating and interpreting pictures as faces. See ASCII art.

An equal sign is often used for the eyes in place of the colon, without changing the meaning of the emoticon. In these instances, the hyphen is almost always either omitted or, occasionally, replaced with an 'o' as in =o). Lately it has become common to omit the hyphen, whether a colon or an equal sign is used for the eyes [1]. In general, similar-looking characters are commonly substituted for one another: for instance, o, O, and 0 can all be used interchangeably, sometimes for subtly different effect.

A few people turn the smiley around, a "left handed" smiley (: This left-handed smiley can sometimes cause miscommunication though, since some hardcore net addicts tend to drop the  : representing the eyes [leaving ) instead of  :) ] so what was intended to be a smile could be interpreted as a frown.

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 the shift key.

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 surprised).

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 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 a month later in response to the reaction their claim had generated.

XD (used to represent laughing) supposedly became popular on the internet shortly after it was used in the television show, South Park, usually explained to the unknowing as the emoticon being akin to the animation method used when a character was laughing so hard they had their eyes closed (a sideways X for their eyes).

East Asian style

Users from East Asia (particularly Japanese language speakers those who visit 2channel) popularized a style of emoticons known as verticons (顔文字, kaomoji^?, literally "face characters"), which can be understood without turning one's head to the left. These styles of faces roughly resemble the style commonly found in Japanese anime and manga comic books.

These emoticons are usually found in a format similar to (*_*), where the asterisks indicate the eyes, the central character, usually an underscore, the mouth, and the parentheses, the outline of the face. A large number of different characters can be used to replace the eyes, which usually is where the emoticon derives its emotive aspect (contrasting the Western emoticons' emoting through the mouth). The emphasis on the eyes is reflected in the common usage of emoticons that use only the eyes, e.g. ^^. Characters like hyphens or periods can replace the underscore; the period is often used for a smaller, "cuter" mouth or to represent a nose, e.g. (^.^). Alternatively, the mouth/nose can be left out entirely, e.g. (^^). The parentheses also can often be replaced with braces, e.g. {^_^}. Many times, the parentheses are left out completely, e.g. o.o . A quotation mark ", apostrophe ', or semicolon ; can be appended to the emoticon to imply apprehension or embarrassment, à la the anime sweat drop. Many other characters can be appended to also indicate arms or hands, e.g. <(^_^)> or
⊂( ﾟ ヮﾟ)⊃.

Basic examples

Complex examples

Western use of East Asian style

English-language anime forums adopted kaomoji that could be used with the standard ASCII characters available on western keyboards. Because of this, they are often called "anime style" emoticons in the English-speaking Internet. They have since seen use in more mainstream venues, including online gaming, instant-messaging, and other non-anime related forums. Emoticons such as <(^_^)>, which include the parentheses, mouth or nose, and arms (especially those represented by the inequality signs < or >) also are often referred to as "Kirbies" in reference to their likeness to Nintendo's video game character, Kirby. The parentheses are usually dropped when used in the English language context.

2channel style

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. Most kaomoji contain Cyrillic and other foreign letters to create even more complicated expressions analogous to ASCII art's level of complexity. To type such emoticons, the input editor that is used to type Japanese on a user's system is equipped with a dictionary of emoticons, after which the user simply types the Japanese word (or something close to it) that represents the desired emoticon to convert the input into such complicated emoticons. Such expressions are known as Shift JIS art.

Users of 2channel in particular have developed a wide variety of unique emoticons using obscure characters. Some have taken on a life of their own and become characters in their own right, like Mona.

Basic examples

Graphic emoticons

Graphic emoticons (small images that often automatically replaced typed text) are commonly used instead of the older text variants, especially on Internet forums and instant messenger programs. These are often heavily animated, some taking up to at least a full five seconds to fully loop, and sometimes (mostly on instant messengers) with sound embedded in, to bring it to full life.

Examples

See also

• Smiley
• Kaoani
• ASCII art
• ASCII comic
• Internet slang
• Egyptian hieroglyph
• Dancing Banana

In Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Emoticons.

References

Further reading

• Walther, J. B., & D'Addario, K. P. (2001). "The impacts of emoticons on message interpretation in computer-mediated communication". Social Science Computer Review 19: 323–345.

External links

History

• 1976: PLATO emoticons Character overstriking patterns
• 1982: The First Smiley :-) Mike Jones' article about Fahlman's CMU post (with his testimony)
• 1982: Smiley Lore :-) by Scott E. Fahlman

Examples

• List of MSN messenger emoticons
• List of Yahoo messenger emoticons
• List of AOL messenger emoticons
• Popular emoticons at h2g2 (includes unusual motifs, such as food and holidays)

Asian emoticons

• Asian Emoticons explained

Japanese emoticons

• Anikaos Japanese Anime emoticons list
• Japanese/anime emoticons list
• 2-byte Japanese emoticons
• AA(Japanese ASCII art) underground thread @ hiding place (English version)
• Article - A Guide to Anime Emoticons Western usage of kaomoji
• Koto Phone in Japan Flickr set - Example of default kaomoji on Japanese cell phone