An emoticon, also called a smiley, is a sequence of ordinary printable ASCII characters, such as :-), ;o), ^_^ or :-(, or a small image, intended to represent a human facial expression and convey an emotion. Emoticons are a form of paralanguage commonly used in e-mail messages, in online bulletin boards, online forums, instant messengers, or in chat rooms, without them simple statements could be misinterpreted. Sometime during 1981, Scott Fahlman (now a Principle 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. In truth, the second element is con, short for console[citation needed] , not icon. A similar portmanteau, verticon (based on vertical and (i?)con), 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).

Basic examples

The following examples all use a consistent form, but each of them can also be transformed by being rotated, having the hyphen omitted, and/or by replacing the eyes symbol. 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. Please note that the definitions for the following examples are not absolute definitions rather a general idea of their meaning.

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 the shift key.

Adding }}} before an emoticon converts it into a Klingon. e.g. }}};-) A winking Klingon.

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.

There also exists the use of umlauts to achieve emoticons that aren't tilted to the side. For example, ? 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 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).

Posture emoticons

orz (sometimes seen as OTL Or2, On_, OTZ, O7Z, Sto, Jto, _no, _|￣|○) spawned a subculture in late 2004. It illustrates a person facing left and kneeling on the ground: the "o" symbolizes the head, the "r" represents the arms and the body while the "z" shows the legs. Though people use the pictograph to show that they have failed and/or they are in despair, some people, in Taiwan, use it to show that they laugh a lot so that they kneel down. It is not read phonetically, the letters are spelled out. Not to be confused with m(_ _)m, which means an apology.

Orz is associated sometimes with the phrase "nice guy" - that is, the concept of males being rejected for a date by girls they are pursuing with a phrase like "You're a nice guy," "I'd like to be your friend," etc., a la "nice guy syndrome".

On imageboards, it has been used not only for failure and despair, but also as a symbol for the kowtow, illustrating instead a person bowing down in worship of a certain picture that was posted.