See also: ASCII art.
Not to be confused with emoji.
Emoticon (a portmanteau of «emotion» and «icon»; Q31963 on
Wikidata) is a short group of text characters
that together by their look resemble a simple picture, very often a
facial expression (but also other common symbols), for example
:-), O_O or =[ can all mean
happy, shock, and sadness, in that order. Emoticons are used to
communicate feelings and emotions in text-only communication, such as
Internet chat, such as that of IRC, where body
language is missing to provide this function. Emoticons are different
from emoji (which serve basically the same
purpose but are true, small pictures inserted in text) and smileys
(smiling faces, both emoticon and emoji).
The history of emoticons reaches far back before computers, possibly even to the 17th century; the
invention of emoticons in computer communication is generally attributed
to American Scott Fahlman, who, as a teacher in 1982, suggested marking
jokes on the school BBS with :-), exactly for the reason
that some people didn't get jokes because of the absence of body
language.
There are different types of emoticons, mainly
Western, which are 90 degrees flipped,
e.g. :-) or :{ (the nose symbol is sometimes
missing), and Eastern, which are not flipped,
e.g. <[o_o]> or (^.^). Western ones can
additionally also be flipped, e.g. (-: instead of
:-), but doing it is not very common.
This page was last edited on 2026-09-13 22:59:54.
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