Emoticons or Smileys

Everyone knows them, the small smiling faces that are often used in, among other things, MSN conversations, text messages and emails. These faces are called smileys or emoticons and consist of a picture or a series of punctuation marks or letters. An article about the history, usefulness, and different types of smileys and emoticons.

History

The first smiley ever dates back to 1982. Computer scientist Scott Fahlman typed the laughing emoticon here 🙂 in a message on the digital notice board of Carnegie Mellon University. Scott Fahlman decided that this would be a good symbol to show that a digital message is not meant to be taken completely seriously. Smileys are still used today for that reason, among others. Below is a copy of the message from 1982:

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

🙁

The usefulness of smileys

Emoticons and smileys are mainly placed in digital messages. Why? You receive digital messages without the emotion you have during a ‘real-life’ conversation. If you are having a conversation with someone on the street and they cynically tell you that they hate holidays, you can tell from their tone and facial expression that the comment was intended to be cynical. So the person actually means that he/she is very happy with the holiday. If you receive an email from the same person with the same sentence, you will probably think they are crazy. Everyone likes holidays, right?
The emotions you miss in a digital message are replaced by emoticons. This creates less confusion.

Different emoticons

There are roughly two types of emoticons, Western and Asian. These two types can be divided into three types of designs; typed, an image and an animated image. The Western and Asian variants are briefly discussed below.

Western

With Western emoticons, your head must be turned a quarter turn to the left to see the smiley in the way it is intended. A smiley here is often a sequence of punctuation marks and letters. The colon stands for open eyes, a semicolon for a wink, a horizontal line for the nose and an opening bracket, closing bracket, D or P, among other things, for the mouth. Nowadays the nose is increasingly omitted because it is usually the same and only requires extra tapping.

Some emoticons with description:

🙂 / 🙂 / =) ……… Smiling / happy
😀 / 😀 / =D ….. Smile / cheerful
🙁 / 🙁 …………… Sad
:’-( / :'( ………….. Crying
😛 / 😛 =P …….. Humor (P = Tongue)
😉 / 😉 …………… Wink
:-@ / :@ ………. Angry
😐 or 😐 …………. Shocked/surprised
:-S or :S ………. Surprised / incomprehension
:-O or :O ………. Surprised

Asian

With Asian emoticons you don’t have to turn your head to read the smiley properly. This means that other signs are also used here to indicate the eyes, nose and mouth. You compose these smileys with a roof or a dash for eyes, with a point for a nose and with a dash for a mouth. An Asian emoticon often has at least eyes and a nose or mouth. Both are not often encountered due to keyboard capabilities.