Emoticon

This is an accepted version of this page An emoticon (/əˈmoʊtəkɒn/, ə-MOH-tə-kon, rarely /ɪˈmɒtɪkɒn/, ih-MOTT-ih-kon),[1][2][3][4] short for emotion icon,[5] is a pictorial representation of a facial expression using characters—usually punctuation marks, numbers and letters—to express a person's feelings, mood or reaction, without needing to describe it in detail.

The first ASCII emoticons are generally credited to computer scientist Scott Fahlman, who proposed what came to be known as "smileys"—:-) and :-(—in a message on the bulletin board system (BBS) of Carnegie Mellon University in 1982.

Users from Japan popularized a kind of emoticon called kaomoji, using Japanese's larger character sets.

Emoticons have played a significant role in communication through technology, and some devices and applications have provided stylized pictures that do not use text punctuation.

However, experts doubted the inclusion of the colon in the poem was deliberate and if it was meant to represent a smiling face.

"[10] 17th century typography practice often placed colons and semicolons within parentheses, including 14 instances of ":)" in Richard Baxter's 1653 Plain Scripture Proof of Infants Church-membership and Baptism.

[12][13][14] 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"[15] (later reduced to the more formal "best regards").

[20] In a 1912 essay titled "For Brevity and Clarity", American author Ambrose Bierce suggested facetiously[12][17] that a bracket could be used to represent a smiling face, proposing "an improvement in punctuation" with which writers could convey cachinnation, loud or immoderate laughter: "it is written thus ‿ and presents a smiling mouth.

[12][22] In a 1936 Harvard Lampoon article, writer Alan Gregg proposed combining brackets with various other punctuation marks to represent various moods.

[12][23] An instance of text characters representing a sideways smiling and frowning face could be found in the New York Herald Tribune on March 10, 1953, promoting the film Lili starring Leslie Caron.

[25] A further example attributed to a Baltimore Sunday Sun columnist appeared in a 1967 article in Reader's Digest, using a dash and right bracket to represent a tongue in one's cheek: —).

[12][17][26] Prefiguring the modern "smiley" emoticon,[12][19] writer Vladimir Nabokov told an interviewer from The New York Times in 1969, "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.

[28] On the computer system, a student at the University of Illinois developed pictograms that resembled different smiling faces.

[29][30] Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Scott Fahlman is generally credited with the invention of the digital text-based emoticon in 1982.

[33][13] Fahlman sent the following message[a] after an incident where a humorous warning about a mercury spill in an elevator was misunderstood as serious:[17][19][35] Within a few months, the smiley had spread to the ARPANET[36][non-primary source needed] and Usenet.

Many other people did similar to Loufrani from 1995 onwards, including David Sanderson creating the book Smileys in 1997.

The auction was held in Dallas, United States, and sold the two designs as non-fungible tokens (NFT).

Others include wink ;), a grin :D, :P for tongue out, and smug :->; they can be used to denote a flirting or joking tone, or may be implying a second meaning in the sentence preceding it.

However, more westernised Kaomojis have dropped the brackets, such as owo, uwu and TwT, popularised in internet subcultures such as the anime and furry communities.

Users of the Japanese discussion board 2channel, in particular, have developed a variety emoticons using characters from various scripts, such as Kannada, as in ಠ_ಠ (for a look of disapproval, disbelief or confusion).

The consonant jamos ㅅ, ㅁ or ㅂ can be used as the mouth or nose component and ㅇ, ㅎ or ㅍ for the eyes.

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 ㅠ.ㅡ, ㅡ^ㅜ and ㅜㅇㅡ.

[citation needed] Orz (other forms include: Or2, on_, OTZ, OTL, STO, JTO,[61] _no, _冂○[62] and 囧​rz[60]) is an emoticon representing a kneeling or bowing person (the Japanese version of which is called dogeza), 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.

By 2005, Orz spawned a subculture: blogs have been devoted to the emoticon, and URL shortening services have been named after it.

[67] 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 emoticlip concept is credited to the Bradley & Montgomery advertising firm, which wrote that they hoped it would be widely adopted as "greeting cards that just happen to be selling something".

[68] In 2000, Despair, Inc. obtained a U.S. trademark registration for the "frowny" emoticon :-( when used on "greeting cards, posters and art prints".

[73] A different, but related, use of the term "emoticon" is found in the Unicode Standard, referring to a subset of emoji that display facial expressions.

[74] The standard explains this usage with reference to existing systems, which provided functionality for substituting certain textual emoticons with images or emoji of the expressions in question.