Emoticon

A smiley-face emoticon

An emoticon (/ᵻˈmoʊtᵻkɒn/ or /iˈmoʊtᵻkɒn/), etymologically a portmanteau of emotion and icon, is a metacommunicative pictorial representation of a facial expression that, in the absence of body language and prosody, serves to draw a receiver's attention to the tenor or temper of a sender's nominal non-verbal communication, changing and improving its interpretation. It expresses — usually by means of punctuation marks (though it can include numbers and letters) — a person's feelings or mood, though as emoticons have become more popular, some devices have provided stylized pictures that do not use punctuation.

In Western countries, emoticons are usually written at a right angle to the direction of the text. Users from Japan popularized a kind of emoticons called kaomoji (顔文字, often confused with emoji in the West) that can be understood without tilting one's head to the left. This style arose on ASCII NET of Japan in 1986.

As social media has become widespread, emoticons have played a significant role in communication through technology. They offer another range of "tone" and feeling through texting that portrays specific emotions through facial gestures while in the midst of text-based cyber communication.Also used in ways of phone texting like snap chat facebook instagram

Origin of the term

The word is a portmanteau word of the English words "emote" and "icon". In web forums, instant messengers and online games, text emoticons are often automatically replaced with small corresponding images, which came to be called "emoticons" as well. Emoticons for a smiley face :-) and sad face :-( appear in the first documented use in digital form. Certain complex character combinations can only be accomplished in a double-byte language, giving rise to especially complex forms, sometimes known by their romanized Japanese name of kaomoji.

The use of emoticons can be traced back to the 19th century, and they were commonly used in casual and humorous writing. Digital forms of emoticons on the Internet were included in a proposal by Scott Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a message on 19 September 1982.

History

Antecedents

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 Morse code abbreviations are more succinct than modern abbreviations such as LOL.

A New York Times transcript from an Abraham Lincoln speech written in 1862 contains "(applause and laughter ;)"; there is some debate as to whether it is a typo, a legitimate punctuation construct, or an emoticon.

Emoticons published in the March 30, 1881 issue of Puck.

Four vertical typographical emoticons were published in 1881 by the U.S. satirical magazine Puck, with the stated intention that the publication's letterpress department thus intended to "lay out ... all the cartoonists that ever walked."

In 1912, Ambrose Bierce proposed "an improvement in punctuation – the snigger point, or note of cachinnation: it is written thus ‿ and presents a smiling mouth. It is to be appended, with the full stop, to every jocular or ironical sentence".

In a 1936 Harvard Lampoon article, Alan Gregg proposed (-) for smile, (--) for laugh (more teeth showing), (#) for frown, (*) for wink, and (#) for "intense interest, attention, and incredulity". Note that the symbols are correctly oriented and are not sideways.

Emoticons had already come into use in sci-fi fandom in the 1940s, although there seems to have been a lapse in cultural continuity between the communities.

The September 1962 issue of MAD Magazine published an article titled "Typewri-toons." The piece, featuring typewriter-generated artwork credited to "Royal Portable," was entirely made up of repurposed typography, including a capital letter P having a bigger bust than a capital I, a lowercase b and d discussing their pregnancies, an asterisk on top of a letter to indicate the letter had just come inside from a snowfall, and a classroom of lowercase n's interrupted by a lowercase h "raising its hand." Two additional "Typewri-toons" articles subsequently appeared in Mad, in 1965 and 1987.

Moscow Olympic Games 1980, Polish poster

In 1963 the "smiley face", a yellow button with two black dots representing eyes and an upturned thick curve representing a 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 many later emoticons; the most basic graphic emoticon that depicts this is in fact a small yellow smiley face.

In a New York Times interview in April 1969, 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."

On the PLATO system in the 1970s, emoticons and other decorative graphics were produced as ASCII art, particularly with overprinting: typing a character, backing up, then typing another character. For example, WOBTAX and VICTORY both produced convincing smiley faces. This developed into a sophisticated set, particularly in combination with superscript and subscript.

Creation of :-) and :-(

Scott Fahlman was the first documented person to use the emoticons :-) and :-(, with a specific suggestion that they be used to express emotion. The text of his original proposal, posted to the Carnegie Mellon University computer science general board on 19 September 1982 (11:44), was thought to have been lost, but was recovered 20 years later by Jeff Baird from old backup tapes.

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

:-(

Other notable computer scientists who participated in this thread include David Touretzky, Guy Steele, and Jaime Carbonell.

Within a few months, it had spread to the ARPANET and Usenet. Many variations on the theme were immediately suggested by Scott and others.

Western style

Example of emoticon used on road sign in Katowice, Poland

Usually, emoticons in Western style have the eyes on the left, followed by nose and the mouth. The two character version :) which omits the nose is also very popular.

Common Western examples

Main article: List of emoticons

The most basic emoticons are relatively consistent in form, but each of them can be transformed by being rotated (making them tiny ambigrams), with or without a hyphen (nose). There are also some possible variations to emoticons to get new definitions, like changing a character to express a new feeling, or slightly change the mood of the emoticon. For example, :( equals sad and :(( equals very sad or weeping. A blush can be expressed as :">. Others include wink ;), a grin :D, smug :->, and tongue out :P for disgust or simply just to stick the tongue out for silliness, such as when blowing a raspberry. An often used combination is also <3 for a heart, and </3 for a broken heart. :O is also sometimes used to depict shock.

A broad grin is sometimes shown with crinkled eyes to express further amusement; XD and the addition of further "D" letters can suggest laughter or extreme amusement e.g. XDDDD. There are hundreds of other variations including >:( for anger, or >:D for an evil grin, which can be, again, used in reverse, for an unhappy angry face, in the shape of D:<. =K for vampire teeth, :s for grimace, and ;P can be used to denote a flirting or joking tone, or may be implying a second meaning in the sentence preceding it.

As computers offer increasing built-in support for non-Western writing systems, it has become possible to use other glyphs to build emoticons. The 'shrug' emoticon, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, uses the glyph ツ from the Japanese katakana writing system.

Variation

Main article: ASCII art

An equal sign is often used for the eyes in place of the colon, seen as =), 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) . In most circles it has become acceptable to omit the hyphen, whether a colon or an equal sign is used for the eyes, but in some areas of usage people still prefer the larger, more traditional emoticon :-) or :^). 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 or, in some cases, one type of character may look better in a certain font and therefore be preferred over another. It is also common for the user to replace the rounded brackets used for the mouth with other, similar brackets, such as ] instead of ).

Some variants are also more common in certain countries due to keyboard layouts. For example, the smiley =) may occur in Scandinavia, where the keys for = and ) are placed right beside each other. However, the :) variant is without a doubt the dominant one in Scandinavia, making the =) version a rarity. Diacritical marks are sometimes used. The letters Ö and Ü can be seen as an emoticon, as the upright version of :O (meaning that one is surprised) and :D (meaning that one is very happy) respectively.

Some emoticons may be read right to left instead, and in fact can only be written using standard ASCII keyboard characters this way round; for example D: which refers to being shocked or anxious, opposite to the large grin of :D.

Japanese style

Users from Japan popularized a style of emoticons (顔文字, kaomoji) that can be understood without tilting one's head to the left. This style arose on ASCII NET of Japan in 1986. Similar looking emoticons were used by Byte Information Exchange (BIX) around the same time.

These emoticons are usually found in a format similar to (*_*). The asterisks indicate the eyes; the central character, commonly an underscore, the mouth; and the parentheses, the outline of the face.

Different emotions such as (")(-_-)("), are expressed by changing the character representing the eyes, for example "T" can be used to express crying or sadness (T_T). T_T may also be used as meaning 'unimpressed'. The emphasis on the eyes is reflected in the common usage of emoticons that use only the eyes, e.g. ^^. Looks of stress are represented by the likes of (x_x) while (-_-;) is a generic emoticon for nervousness, the semicolon indicating sweat that occurs during anxiety. Repeating the /// mark can indicate embarrassment by symbolizing blushing. 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. (^^).

Parentheses also can often be replaced with braces, e.g. {^_^}. Many times, the parentheses are left out completely, e.g. ^^, >.< , o_O, O.O, e_e and/or e.e. A quotation mark ", apostrophe ', or semicolon ; can be added to the emoticon to imply apprehension or embarrassment, in the same way that a sweat drop is used in popular and common Asian animation.

Microsoft IME 2000 (Japanese) or later supports the use of both forms of emoticons by enabling Microsoft IME Spoken Language/Emotion Dictionary. In IME 2007, it was moved to Emoticons dictionary.

Further variations of emoticons may be produced by using combining characters, e.g. ٩(͡๏̯͡๏)۶ and ᶘᵒᴥᵒᶅ.

These emoticons can be used also with [ ] instead of ( ), or without the parentheses at all in some of the cases. There is also the \(0O0)\, indicating a hooligan or crazed behaviour, and the (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧.

Western use of Japanese style

English-language anime forums adopted those emoticons 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 <( ^.^ )>, <(^_^<), <(o_o<), <( -'.'- )>, <('.'-^) or (>';..;')> which include the parentheses, mouth or nose, and arms (especially those represented by the inequality signs < or >) also are often referred to as "Kirbys" in reference to their likeness to Nintendo's video game character, Kirby. The parentheses are sometimes dropped when used in the English language context, and the underscore of the mouth may be extended as an intensifier, (e.g. ^_________^ for very happy) for the emoticon in question. This emoticon t(-_-t) uses the eastern style, but incorporates a depiction of the western "middle-finger flick-off" (commonly known as 'the bird')" using a "t" as the arm, hand, and finger. Also, one of the newer ones, *,..,*, or `;..;´ as such for a "vampire" or other mythical beasts with fangs.

Mixture of Western and Japanese style

Exposure to both Western and Japanese style emoticons or kaomoji (often incorrectly called emoji) through blogs, instant messaging, and forums featuring a blend of Western and Japanese pop culture, has given rise to emoticons that have an upright viewing format. The parentheses are similarly dropped in the English language context and the emoticons only use alphanumeric characters and the most commonly used English punctuation marks. Emoticons such as -O-, -3-, -w-, '_', ;_;, T_T, :>, and .V. are used to convey mixed emotions that are more difficult to convey with traditional emoticons. Characters are sometimes added to emoticons to convey an anime or manga-styled sweat drop, for example: ^_^' or !>_<! as well as: <@>_____<@>;;, ;O; and *u*. The equal sign can also be used for closed, anime looking eyes, for example: =0=, =3=, =w=, =A= and =7=.

There are also more faces along those lines like >o<; using the ; as a sweat mark, and the o as a mouth, and the inequality signs as the eyes, it shows stress, or slight confusion. The number of emoticons that can be made is very large, and can express many shades of meaning.

In Brazil, sometimes combining character (accent) are added to emoticons to represent eyebrows, like: ò_ó, ó_ò, õ_o, ù_u or o_Ô. They can also replace (or add) = or : with > , for example >D, >=D, >P, >:P, >3 or >:3.

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 characters from various languages, such as Kannada: ಠ_ಠ (for a look of disapproval, disbelief, or confusion); these were quickly picked up by 4chan and spread to other Western sites soon after. Some have taken on a life of their own and become characters in their own right, like Mona.

Korean style

In South Korea, emoticons use Korean Hangul letters, and the Western style is rarely used. The structures of Korean and Japanese emoticons are somewhat similar, but they have some differences. Korean style contains Korean jamo (letters) instead of other characters. There are countless number of emoticons that can be formed with such combinations of Korean jamo letters. Consonant jamos : ㅅ or ㅁ or ㅂ as the mouth/nose component and ㅇ,ㅎ,ㅍ for the eyes. For example: ㅇㅅㅇ, ㅇㅂㅇ, ㅇㅁㅇ and -ㅅ-. Faces such as 'ㅅ', "ㅅ", 'ㅂ' and 'ㅇ', using quotation marks " and apostrophes ' are also commonly used combinations. Vowel jamos such as ㅜ,ㅠ depict a crying face. Example: ㅜㅜ, ㅠㅠ and 뉴뉴 (same function as T in western style). Sometimes ㅡ (not an em-dash "—" but a vowel jamo), a comma or an underscore is added, and the two character sets can be mixed together, as in ㅜ.ㅜ, ㅠ.ㅜ, ㅠ.ㅡ, ㅜ_ㅠ, ㅡ^ㅜ and ㅜㅇㅡ. Also, semicolons and carets are commonly used in Korean emoticons; semicolons mean sweating (embarrassed). If they are used with ㅡ or - they depict a bad feeling. Examples: -;/, --^, ㅡㅡ;;;, -_-;; and -_^. However, ^^, ^오^ means smile (almost all people use this without distinction of sex or age). Others include: ~_~, --a, -6-, +0+.

Chinese ideographic style

See also: Jiong

The character 囧 (U+56E7), which means "bright", is also used in the Chinese computing community for a frowning face. It is also combined with posture emoticon Orz, such as 囧rz. The character existed in Oracle bone script, but its use as emoticon was documented as early as January 20, 2005.

Other ideographic variants for 囧 include 崮 (king 囧), 莔 (queen 囧), 商 (囧 with hat), 囧興 (turtle), 卣 (Bomberman).

The character 槑 (U+69D1), which sounds like the word for "plum" (梅 (U+FA44)), is used to represent double of 呆 (dull), or further magnitude of dullness. In Chinese, normally full characters (as opposed to the stylistic use of 槑) may be duplicated to express emphasis.

Posture emoticons

Orz

Orz (also seen as Or2, on_, OTZ, OTL, STO, JTO, _no, ＿冂○, 囧​rz, O7Z, _|7O, Sto, O|¯|_, orz, and Jto) is an emoticon representing a kneeling or bowing person, with the "o" being the head, the "r" being the arms and part of the body, and the "z" being part of the body and the legs. This stick figure represents failure and despair. It is also commonly used for representing a great admiration (sometimes with an overtone of sarcasm) for someone else's view or action.

It was first used in late 2002 at the forum on Techside, Japanese personal website. At the "Techside FAQ Forum" (TECHSIDE教えて君BBS(教えてBBS) ), a poster asked about a cable cover, typing "＿|￣|○" to show a cable and its cover. Others commented that it looked like a kneeling person, and the symbol became popular. These comments were soon deleted as they were considered off-topic. However, one of the first corresponding reactions can be found on the thread on "Techside Chitchat Forum" (Techside一言板。) at the Wayback Machine, on December 23, 2002. By 2005, Orz spawned a subculture: blogs have been devoted to the emoticon, and URL shortening services have been named after it. In Taiwan, Orz is associated 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 are a nice guy."

Orz should not be confused with m(_ _)m, which means "Thank you" or an apology.

Multimedia variations

A portmanteau of emotion and sound, an emotisound is a brief sound transmitted and played back during the viewing of a message, typically an IM message or e-mail message. The sound is intended to communicate an emotional subtext. Many instant messaging clients automatically trigger sound effects in response to specific emoticons.

Some services, such as MuzIcons, combine emoticons and music player in an Adobe Flash-based widget.

In 2004, The Trillian chat application introduced a feature called "emotiblips", which allows Trillian users to stream files to their instant message recipients "as the voice and video equivalent of an emoticon".

In 2007, MTV and Paramount Home Entertainment promoted the "emoticlip" as a form of viral marketing for the second season of the show The Hills. The emoticlips were twelve short snippets of dialogue from the show, uploaded to YouTube, which the advertisers hoped would be distributed between web users as a way of expressing feelings in a similar manner to emoticons. The emoticlip concept is credited to the Bradley & Montgomery advertising firm, which hopes they would be widely adopted as "greeting cards that just happen to be selling something".

In 2008, an emotion-sequence animation tool, called FunIcons was created. The Adobe Flash and Java-based application allows users to create a short animation. Users can then email or save their own animations to use them on similar social utility applications.

During the first half of the 2010s, there have been different forms of small audiovisual pieces to be sent through instant messaging systems to express one's emotion. These videos lack of a popular name yet and there are several ways to designate them: "emoticlips" (named above), "emotivideos" or more recently "emoticon videos". These are tiny little videos which can be easily transferred from one mobile phone to another or many other devices. The current video compression codecs (like H.264) allow these pieces of video to be light in terms of KB and very portable.

Emoticons and intellectual property rights

Patented drop down menu for composing phone mail text message with emoticons. US 6987991 

In 2000, Despair, Inc. obtained a U.S. trademark registration for the "frowny" emoticon :-( when used on "greeting cards, posters and art prints." In 2001, they issued a satirical press release, announcing that they would sue Internet users who typed the frowny; the joke backfired and the company received a storm of protest when its mock release was posted on technology news website Slashdot.

A number of patent applications have been filed on inventions that assist in communicating with emoticons. A few of these have issued as US patents. US 6987991 , for example, discloses a method developed in 2001 to send emoticons over a cell phone using a drop down menu. The stated advantage over the prior art was that the user saved on the number of keystrokes though this may not address the obviousness criteria.

In Finland, the Supreme Administrative Court ruled in 2012 that the emoticon cannot be trademarked, thus repealing a 2006 administrative decision trademarking the emoticons :-), =), =(, :) and :(. The emoticon :-) was also filed in 2006 and registered in 2008 as a European Community Trademark (CTM).

In 2008, Russian entrepreneur Oleg Teterin claimed to have been granted the trademark on the ;-) emoticon. A license would not "cost that much – tens of thousands of dollars" for companies, but would be free of charge for individuals.

Unicode

Main article: Emoticons (Unicode block)

Emoticons are introduced in Unicode Standard version 6.0 (published in October 2010). It covers Unicode range from 1F600 to 1F64F.

Emoticons Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF)

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

A

B

C

D

E

F

U+1F60x

😀

😁

😂

😃

😄

😅

😆

😇

😈

😉

😊

😋

😌

😍

😎

😏

U+1F61x

😐

😑

😒

😓

😔

😕

😖

😗

😘

😙

😚

😛

😜

😝

😞

😟

U+1F62x

😠

😡

😢

😣

😤

😥

😦

😧

😨

😩

😪

😫

😬

😭

😮

😯

U+1F63x

😰

😱

😲

😳

😴

😵

😶

😷

😸

😹

😺

😻

😼

😽

😾

😿

U+1F64x

🙀

🙁

🙂

🙃

🙄

🙅

🙆

🙇

🙈

🙉

🙊

🙋

🙌

🙍

🙎

🙏

Notes 1.^ As of Unicode version 8.0

See also

• ASCII art
• Emoji
• Emotion Markup Language (EML)
• Emotions in virtual communication
• Henohenomoheji
• Hieroglyph
• iConji
• Internet slang
• Kaoani
• List of emoticons
• Martian language
• Pixel art
• Smiley
• Tête à Toto
• Text

Further reading

• , in Dissertations Abstracts International 48(7)
• Bódi, Zoltán – Veszelszki, Ágnes (2006). Emotikonok. Érzelemkifejezés az internetes kommunikációban (Emoticons. Expressing emotions in the internet communication). Budapest: Magyar Szemiotikai Társaság.
• Dresner, Eli, & Herring, Susan C. (2010). "Functions of the non-verbal in CMC: Emoticons and illocutionary force." Communication Theory 20: 249-268. Preprint: [1]
• Veszelszki, Ágnes (2012). Connections of Image and Text in Digital and Handwritten Documents. In: Benedek, András − Nyíri, Kristóf (eds): The Iconic Turn in Education. Series Visual Learning Vol. 2. Frankfurt am Main et al.: Peter Lang, pp. 97−110.
• Veszelszki, Ágnes (2015). Emoticons vs. Reaction-Gifs. Non-Verbal Communication on the Internet from the Aspects of Visuality, Verbality and Time. In: Benedek, András − Nyíri, Kristóf (eds.): Beyond Words. Pictures, Parables, Paradoxes (series Visual Learning, vol. 5). Frankfurt: Peter Lang. 131−145.
• Wolf, Alecia (2000). "Emotional expression online: Gender differences in emoticon use." CyberPsychology & Behavior 3: 827–833.