Emoticon |
An emoticon, sometimes called a .
A similar portmanteau, verticon (based on vertical and icon ), is sometimes used when referring to the #East Asian style of emoticon.
==History==
== Background ==
An early known instance of using text characters to represent a sideways smiling (and frowning) face is in a newspaper advertisement in the New York Herald Tribune , March 10, 1953, on page 20, columns 4–6. Promoting the film Lili , starring Leslie Caron, the ad read as follows:
:Today :You ll laugh :) :You ll cry :( :You ll love [ heart-shaped face ] : Lili
The film opened nationwide, so the ad may have run in many newspapers.
In 1963 the smiley face , a yellow button with a smile and two dots representing eyes, was invented by freelance artist Harvey Ball. This smiley presumably inspired later emoticons; the most basic emoticon image is a small yellow smiley face.
The earliest known non-ASCII emoticons were used in the PLATO System program as early as 1972, which allowed users to type multiple text characters on top of each other. Many combinations of ordinary text characters were known to produce face-like patterns, which were used as emoticons.
Several sites on the was a tongue, not a nose. Although it has two out of the three characters of the smiley, its intended interpretation was different and it doesn t appear to have inspired the later smileys.
Every issue of the British fashion magazine i-D, founded in 1980, has featured a cover model with a winking right eye (or sometimes obscured in a different way).
== Creation of 
==
The creator of the original .
19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman
From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>
I propose that the following character sequence [be used] 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
== Internet usage ==
In (IM) tools perform such replacement automatically when receiving a message. Originally, these image emoticons were fairly simple and replaced only the most straightforward and common text strings, but over time they became so complex that the more specialized emoticons are often input using a menu of sometimes hundreds of emoticons. Often these menus go beyond the realm of emoticons and also have other objects such as musical instruments and can sometimes make sounds upon receiving the message.
An August 2004 issue of the Risks Digest ( comp.risks on USENET) pointed out a problem with such features which are not under the sender s control: :It s hard to know in advance what character-strings will be parsed into what kind of unintended image. A colleague was discussing his 401(k) plan with his boss, who happens to be female, via instant messaging. He discovered, to his horror, that the boss s instant-messaging client was rendering the (k) as a big pair of red smoochy lips. [http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/23.48.html#subj5]
=Purposes=
Emoticons have developed over the years as a replacement for facial expressions and other emotional cues lacking in text-only communication; the goal is to avoid misunderstandings due to the lack of contextual information. Many books have been written on this subject, with voluminous listings of emoticons.
=Western style=
Traditionally, the emoticon in Western style is written from left to right, the way one reads and writes in most Western cultures. Thus, most commonly, you ll see the eyes on the left, followed by the nose and mouth. To more easily recognise them, tilt your head towards your left shoulder (or occasionally towards your right shoulder if the top of the emoticon is towards the right).
The smile is represented with a basic smiley . The colon (punctuation) represents the eyes, the hyphen is for the nose, and the parenthesis is 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).
==Basic examples==
The following examples all use the basic form, but each of them can be transformed to be rotated, to lose the hyphen and/or to replace the eyes symbol. Lately it has become common to omit the hyphen.
==Variants==
There are endless possibilities, because people are very good at creating and interpreting pictures as faces. See ASCII art.
Some variants are also more common in certain countries because of reasons like keyboard layouts, for example the smiley =) is common in Scandinavia and Finland where the keys for = and ) are placed right beside each other and both need the use of the shift key.
A few people turn the smiley around, a left handed smiley (: This left-handed smiley can sometimes cause miscommunication though, since some hardcore net addicts tend to drop the : representing the eyes [leaving ) instead of :) ] so what was intended to be a smile could be interpreted as a frown.
There also exists the use of umlauts to achieve emoticons that aren t tilted to the side. For example, Ã? is the upright version of :O (meaning that one is alarmed).
As more of a joke than anything but also as a political statement frownies , the symbol , were trademarked by Despair, Inc. in U.S. Trademark Serial No. 75502288, Registration No. 2347676 . The trademark applies only to Printed matter namely, greeting cards, posters and art prints . In January 2001 Despair issued a satirical [http://web.archive.org/web/20010124042700/http://www.despair.com/demotivators/frownonthis.html press release] in which it was announced that the company would be suing over 7 million internet users who had infringed their trademark. They subsequently issued [http://web.archive.org/web/20010208214111/http://www.despair.com/demotivators/acompromise.html another press release] a month later in response to the reaction their claim had generated.
XD (used to represent laughing) supposedly became popular on the internet shortly after it was used in South Park, usually explained to the unknowing as the Emoticon being akin to the animation method used when a character was laughing so hard they had their eyes closed (a sideways X for their eyes).
==Head and hands emoticons==
These emoticons aren t rotated, they include the letter o for a human head, and slashes and backslashes for the arms.
Tricolors are obviously a problem, so alternatives are used, such as )(7 ), meant to represent the Irish harp.
=Graphic emoticons=
Graphical emoticons (small images that often automatically replaced typed text) commonly are used instead of the older text variants, especially on Internet forums and instant messenger programs.
=See also=
=External links=
==History==
] Evidence of one of the first smiley emoticons from 1982] by Scott E. Fahlman, who is widely credited as being the first person to use a sideways smiley face in an electronic medium. emoticon. (Note: While the press release may be humorous, the registration is legitimate.)==Examples==
==Japanese emoticons==
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