An emoticon is a small piece of specialized ASCII art (usually two to five characters, always on a single line) used in text messages as informal markup to indicate emotions and attitudes that would be conveyed by body language in face-to-face communications. They are intended to be relatively simple to type, easy to recognize, and most commonly represent stylized facial expressions although occasionally other representations or imagery are also used.

With the advent of richer media in modern instant messaging and sophisticated web-based BBS systems these are often replaced in the display by a small graphic image (usually based on the generic smiley, although other evocative imagery such as hearts are also used).

Some users also use pseudo-html ( for “grin” or … to mark appropriate sections) and BBSs that use BBCode have their own alternative markup for inserting graphic emoticons (:sad: :shocked: etc.) which can also be read as text markup on non-graphical browsers such as Lynx.

Emoticons developed as a form of paralanguage used as extended interpunction symbols in e-mail, instant messaging, online chat, bulletin board systems, and Internet forums where communication is rapid, and the lack of context in purely textual communications could lead to even simple statements being easily misinterpreted.

Often a smile is represented with a basic smiley :-). The colon represents the eyes, the hyphen is for the nose, and the parenthesis 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). There are also other smilies such as X ) and 8 ) This is also used to make figures, objects and animals.

The word “emoticon” is, according to popular etymology, a blend of “emotion” and “icon”. A similar word, “verticon” (from “vertical” and “icon”), is sometimes used when referring to the East Asian style of emoticon (i.e., the symbols represent a face that is vertically, rather than horizontally oriented).

Or smileys :/

A form of expression you would normally see if you saw them in person 😮

=D (grin)

😀

here’s homer simpson

~(_8^(1)