Emoticon

An emoticon, portmanteau of emotion and icon, 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.
ASCII emoticons can be traced back hundreds of years with various one-off uses. The protocol as a way to use them to communicate emotion in conversations is credited to computer scientist Scott Fahlman, who proposed what came to be known as "smileys"—:-) and —in a message on the bulletin board system of Carnegie Mellon University in 1982. In Western countries, emoticons are usually written at a right angle to the direction of the text. Users from Japan popularized a kind of emoticon called kaomoji, using Japanese's larger character sets. This style arose on ASCII NET of Japan in 1986. They are also known as verticons due to their readability without rotations. This is often seen as the 1st generation of emoticons.
The second generation began when computing became more common in the west, and people began replacing the previous ASCII art with actual emoticon icons or designs. One term used to define these types of emoticons compared to ASCII was portrait emoticons, as portrait emoticons are meant to resemble a face from the front like a portrait painting. The use of these emoticons became prevalent when SMS mobile text messaging and the Internet became widespread in the late 1990s, emoticons became increasingly popular and were commonly used in texting, Internet forums and emails. Over time, the designs became more elaborate and emoticons such as ? by Unicode became commonly referred to as Emoticons. They have played a significant role in communication as technology for communication purposes advanced and increased in use. Emoticons today convey non-verbal cues of language, such as facial expressions but also hand gestures, with The Smiley Company stating in interviews that emoticons now allow for greater emotional understanding in writing when emoticons are used. Emoticons were the precursors to modern emojis not just for facial expressions, but also replacing categories like weather, sports and animals.

History

ASCII art and faces (pre-1981)

In 1648, poet Robert Herrick wrote, "Tumble me down, and I will sit Upon my ruins,." Herrick's work predated any other recorded use of brackets as a smiling face by around 200 years. However, experts doubted the inclusion of the colon in the poem was deliberate and if it was meant to represent a smiling face. English professor Alan Jacobs argued that "punctuation, in general, was unsettled in the seventeenth century... Herrick was unlikely to have consistent punctuational practices himself, and even if he did he couldn't expect either his printers or his readers to share them." 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.
Precursors to modern emoticons have existed since the 19th century. 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". Dodge's Manual in 1908 documented the reintroduction of "love and kisses" as the number 88. New Zealand academics Joan Gajadhar and John Green comment that both Morse code abbreviations are more succinct than modern abbreviations such as LOL.
The transcript of one of Abraham Lincoln's speeches in 1862 recorded the audience's reaction as: "". There has been some debate whether the glyph in Lincoln's speech was a typo, a legitimate punctuation construct or the first emoticon. Linguist Philip Seargeant argues that it was a simple typesetting error.
Before March 1881, the examples of "typographical art" appeared in at least three newspaper articles, including Kurjer warszawski from March 5, 1881, using punctuation to represent the emotions of joy, melancholy, indifference and astonishment.
In a 1912 essay titled "For Brevity and Clarity", American author Ambrose Bierce suggested facetiously 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. It is to be appended, with the full stop, to every jocular or ironical sentence". In a 1936 Harvard Lampoon article, writer Alan Gregg proposed combining brackets with various other punctuation marks to represent various moods. Brackets were used for the sides of the mouth or cheeks, with other punctuation used between the brackets to display various emotions: for a smile, for laughter, for a frown and for a wink. 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.
The September 1962 issue of MAD magazine included 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 snowfall, and a classroom of lowercase n's interrupted by a lowercase h "raising its hand". 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: ). Prefiguring the modern "smiley" emoticon, 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."
In the 1970s, the PLATO IV computer system was launched. It was one of the first computers used throughout educational and professional institutions, but rarely used in a residential setting. On the computer system, a student at the University of Illinois developed pictograms that resembled different smiling faces. Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope stated this likely took place in 1972, and they claimed these to be the first emoticons.

ASCII emoticons - First generation (1982–mid-1990s)

In 1982, Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Scott Fahlman is generally credited with the protocol of communicating and portraying emotion in written text. The use of ASCII symbols, a standard set of codes representing typographical marks, was essential to allow the symbols to be displayed on any computer. In Carnegie Mellon's bulletin board system, Fahlman proposed colon–hyphen–right bracket as a label for "attempted humor" to try to solve the difficulty of conveying humor or sarcasm in plain text. Fahlman sent the following message after an incident where a humorous warning about a mercury spill in an elevator was misunderstood as serious:


19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman 
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

Within a few months, the smiley had spread to the ARPANET and Usenet. Other suggestions on the forum included an asterisk and an ampersand, the latter meant to represent a person doubled over in laughter, as well as a percent sign and a pound sign. Scott Fahlman suggested that not only could his emoticon communicate emotion, but also replace language. Since the 1990s, emoticons have become integral to digital communications, and have inspired a variety of other emoticons, including the "winking" face using a semicolon,, a representation of the Face with Tears of Joy emoji and the acronym "LOL".
In 1996, The Smiley Company was established by Nicolas Loufrani and his father Franklin as a way of commercializing the smiley trademark. As part of this, The Smiley Dictionary website was launched and had a focus on ASCII emoticons, where available emoticons were catalogued. In total more than 500 were recorded. Notably this catalog removed the dash instead of :-). The shortening or redesign of ASCII emoticons has not been covered in enough depth to know where the shorter versions originated, but The Smiley Dictionary could have as a minimum influenced the way ASCII emoticons are used today. Many other people did similar to Loufrani from 1995 onwards, including David Sanderson creating the book Smileys in 1997. James Marshall also hosted an online collection of ASCII emoticons that he completed in 2008. In 1998, the book Le Dico Smiley was also published.
A researcher at Stanford University surveyed the emoticons used in four million Twitter messages and found that the smiling emoticon without a hyphen "nose" was much more common than the original version with the hyphen. Linguist Vyvyan Evans argues that this represents a shift in usage by younger users as a form of covert prestige: rejecting a standard usage in order to demonstrate in-group membership.

Portrait emoticons - Second generation (1990s–present)

Nicolas Loufrani began to use the basic text designs and turned them into graphical representations, which are now known as portrait emoticons. His designs were registered at the United States Copyright Office in 1997 and appeared online as GIF files in 1998. For ASCII emoticons that did not exist to convert into graphical form, Loufrani also backward engineered new ASCII emoticons from the graphical versions he created. These were the first graphical representations of ASCII emoticons. Not only did these portrait emoticons portray existing and new ASCII emoticons, but also new features were added, such as hand gestures in the form of white gloves. These have since become standalone emojis along with other emojis that have replaced words in text communication. In 2001, he published his emoticon set online on the Smiley Dictionary. This dictionary included 640 different smiley icons and was published as a book called Dico Smileys in 2002. In 2017, British magazine The Drum referred to Loufrani as the "godfather of the emoji" for his work in the field.
The first American company to take notice of emojis was Google beginning in 2007. In August 2007, a team made up of Mark Davis and his colleagues Kat Momoi and Markus Scherer began petitioning the Unicode Technical Committee in an attempt to standardise the emoji. The UTC, having previously deemed emoji to be out of scope for Unicode, made the decision to broaden its scope to enable compatibility with the Japanese cellular carrier formats which were becoming more widespread. Peter Edberg and Yasuo Kida joined the collaborative effort from Apple Inc. shortly after, and their official UTC proposal came in January 2009 with 625 new emoji characters. Notably the move included a large set of emoticons, designed in an emoji-style but representing different emotions.
In recent times, emoticons, emojis and smileys have often become intertwined and confused. Emojis represent the largest set of graphical communication, but they often include portrait emoticons. In fact, the majority of the most commonly used Emoji are emoticons. In 2024, the BBC reported that 2 of the top 3 emojis were portrait emoticons.
On September 23, 2021, it was announced that Scott Fahlman was holding an auction for the original emoticons he created in 1982. The auction was held in Dallas, United States, and sold the two designs as non-fungible tokens. The online auction ended later that month, with the originals selling for US$237,500. A year later in 2022, The Smiley Company auctioned off an NFT of 42 original graphical emoticon on World Emoji Day. The proceeds of the sale went to the company's non-profit arm, Smiley Movement.
In some programming languages, certain operators are known informally by their emoticon-like appearance. This includes the Spaceship operator <=>, the Diamond operator <> and the Elvis operator ?:.