The firstASCII emoticons are generally credited to computer scientistScott Fahlman, who proposed what came to be known as "smileys"—:-) and:-(—in a message on thebulletin board system (BBS) ofCarnegie Mellon University in 1982. In Western countries, emoticons are usually written at a right angle to the direction of the text.Users fromJapan popularized a kind of emoticon calledkaomoji, usingJapanese's larger character sets. This style arose on ASCII NET of Japan in 1986.[6][7] They are also known asverticons (fromvertical emoticon) due to their readability without rotations.[8]
AsSMS mobile text messaging and theInternet became widespread in the late 1990s, emoticons became increasingly popular and were commonly used intexting,Internet forums andemails. 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. They offer another range of "tone" through texting through facial gestures.[9] Emoticons were the precursors to modernemojis.
Cover of the French magazineLe Charivari, text of a legal ruling against it in the shape of apear, 1834
In 1648, poetRobert Herrick wrote, "Tumble me down, and I will sit Upon my ruins, (smiling yet:)." Herrick's work predated any other recorded use ofbrackets as a smiling face by around 200 years. However, experts doubted the inclusion of thecolon 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."[10] 17th century typography practice often placed colons and semicolons within parentheses, including 14 instances of ":)" inRichard Baxter's 1653Plain Scripture Proof of Infants Church-membership and Baptism.[11]
Precursors to modern emoticons have existed since the 19th century.[12][13][14] TheNational Telegraphic Review and Operators Guide in April 1857 documented the use of the number 73 inMorse code to express "love and kisses"[15] (later reduced to the more formal "best regards").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 bothMorse code abbreviations are more succinct than modern abbreviations such asLOL.[16]
The transcript of one ofAbraham Lincoln's speeches in 1862 recorded the audience's reaction as: "(applause and laughter ;)".[12][17] There has been some debate whether the glyph in Lincoln's speech was atypo, a legitimate punctuation construct or the first emoticon.[18] Linguist Philip Seargeant argues that it was a simpletypesetting error.[19]
"Typographical art" published in the March 5, 1881, issue ofKurjer WarszawskiEmoticons in the satirical magazinePuck on March 30, 1881
Before March 1881, the examples of "typographical art" appeared in at least three newspaper articles, includingKurjer warszawski (published inWarsaw) from March 5, 1881, using punctuation to represent the emotions of joy, melancholy, indifference and astonishment.[20]
Telegraphische Zeichenkunst in the GermanDeutsche Postzeitung, November 16, 1896[21]
In a 1912 essay titled "For Brevity and Clarity", American authorAmbrose 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 conveycachinnation, 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".[12][22] In a 1936Harvard Lampoon article, writer Alan Gregg proposed combining brackets with various otherpunctuation 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,(--) (showing more "teeth") for laughter,(#) for a frown and(*) for awink.[12][23] An instance of text characters representing a sideways smiling and frowning face could be found in theNew York Herald Tribune on March 10, 1953, promoting the filmLili starringLeslie Caron.[24]
The September 1962 issue ofMAD 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, anasterisk 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".[25] A further example attributed to aBaltimore Sunday Sun columnist appeared in a 1967 article inReader's Digest, using adash andright bracket to represent atongue in one's cheek:—).[12][17][26] Prefiguring the modern "smiley" emoticon,[12][19] writerVladimir Nabokov told an interviewer fromThe 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."[27]
In the 1970s, thePLATO 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.[28] On the computer system, a student at theUniversity of Illinois developed pictograms that resembled different smiling faces.Mary Kalantzis andBill Cope stated this likely took place in 1972, and they claimed these to be the first emoticons.[29][30]
ASCII emoticons use in digital communication (1982–mid-1990s)
Carnegie Mellon computer scientistScott Fahlman is generally credited with the invention of the digital text-based emoticon in 1982.[19][31][13] The use ofASCII symbols, a standard set of codes representing typographical marks, was essential to allow the symbols to be displayed on any computer.[32] In Carnegie Mellon'sbulletin board system, Fahlman proposed colon–hyphen–right bracket:-) as a label for "attempted humor" to try to solve the difficulty of conveyinghumor orsarcasm in plain text.[33][13] Fahlman sent the following message[a] after an incident where a humorous warning about amercury spill in an elevator was misunderstood as serious:[17][19][35]
19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c> I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to markthings that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use :-(
In 1996,The Smiley Company was established by Nicolas Loufrani and his father Franklin as a way of commercializing thesmiley trademark. As part of this, The Smiley Dictionary website focused on ASCII emoticons, where a catalogue was made of them. Many other people did similar to Loufrani from 1995 onwards, including David Sanderson creating the bookSmileys in 1997. James Marshall also hosted an online collection of ASCII emoticons that he completed in 2008.[42]
A researcher atStanford University surveyed the emoticons used in four millionTwitter messages and found that the smiling emoticon without a hyphen "nose":) was much more common than the original version with the hyphen:-). LinguistVyvyan Evans argues that this represents a shift in usage by younger users as a form ofcovert prestige: rejecting a standard usage in order to demonstrate in-group membership.[43]
Graphical emoticons and other developments (1990s–present)
Loufrani began to use the basic text designs and turned them into graphical representations. They are now known as graphical emoticons. His designs were registered at theUnited States Copyright Office in 1997 and appeared online asGIF files in 1998.[44][45][46] 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.[47] He published his Smiley icons as well as emoticons created by others, along with their ASCII versions, in an online Smiley Dictionary in 2001.[44] This dictionary included 640 different smiley icons[48][49] and was published as a book calledDico Smileys in 2002.[44][50] In 2017, British magazineThe Drum referred to Loufrani as the "godfather of the emoji" for his work in the field.[51]
On September 23, 2021, it was announced thatScott Fahlman was holding an auction for the original emoticons he created in 1982. The auction was held inDallas, United States, and sold the two designs asnon-fungible tokens (NFT).[52] The online auction ended later that month, with the originals selling forUS$237,500.[53]
Usually, emoticons in Western style have the eyes on the left, followed by the nose and the mouth. It is commonly placed at the end of a sentence, replacing the full stop. The two-character version:), which omits the nose, is very popular. The most basic emoticons are relatively consistent in form, but some can be rotated (making them tinyambigrams). There are also some variations to emoticons to get new definitions, like changing a character to express another feeling. For example,:( equals sad and:(( equals very sad. Weeping can be written as:'(. A blush can be expressed as:">. Others include wink;), a grin:D,:P for tongue out, and smug:->; they can be used todenote a flirting or joking tone, or may be implying asecond meaning in the sentence preceding it.[55];P, such as whenblowing a raspberry. An often used combination is also<3 for aheart and</3 for a broken heart.:O is also sometimes used to depict shock.:/ is used to depict melancholy, disappointment or disapproval.:| may be used to depict a neutral face.
A broad grin is sometimes shown with crinkled eyes to express further amusement;XD and the addition of further "D" letters can suggest laughter or extreme amusement, e.g.,XDDDD. The "3" inX3 and:3 represents an animal's mouth. An equal sign is often used for the eyes in place of the colon, seen as=). It has become more acceptable to omit the hyphen, whether a colon or an equal sign is used for the eyes.[56] One linguistic study has indicated that the use of a nose in an emoticon may be related to the user's age, with younger people less likely to use a nose.[57]
Some variants are also more common in certain countries due tokeyboard layouts. For example, the smiley=) may occur inScandinavia.Diacritical marks are sometimes used. The lettersÖ andÜ can be seen as emoticons, as the upright versions of:O (meaning that one is surprised) and:D (meaning that one is very happy), respectively. In countries where theCyrillic alphabet is used, the right parenthesis) is used as a smiley. Multiple parentheses)))) are used to express greater happiness, amusement or laughter. The colon is omitted due to being in a lesser-known position on theЙЦУКЕН keyboard layout. The 'shrug' emoticon,¯\_(ツ)_/¯, uses the glyphツ from the Japanesekatakana writing system.
Kaomoji are often seen as the Japanese development of emoticons that is separate to theScott Fahlman movement, which started in 1982. In 1986, a designer began to use brackets and otherASCII text characters to form faces. Over time, they became more often differentiated from each other, although both use ASCII characters. However, more westernised Kaomojis have dropped the brackets, such asowo,uwu andTwT, popularised in internet subcultures such as theanime andfurry communities.
Users of the Japanese discussion board2channel, in particular, have developed a variety emoticons using characters from various scripts, such asKannada, as inಠ_ಠ (for a look of disapproval, disbelief or confusion). Similarly, the letter ರೃ was used in emoticons to represent a monocle and ಥ to represent a tearing eye. They were picked up by4chan and spread to other Western sites soon after. Some have become characters in their own right likeMonā.
InSouth Korea, emoticons use KoreanHangul letters, and the Western style is rarely used.[58] The structures of Korean and Japanese emoticons are somewhat similar, but they have some differences. Korean style contains Koreanjamo (letters) instead of other characters.
The consonant jamosㅅ,ㅁ orㅂ can be used as the mouth or nose component andㅇ,ㅎ orㅍ for the eyes. Using quotation marks" and apostrophes' are also commonly used combinations. Vowel jamos such as ㅜ and ㅠ can depict a crying face. Example:ㅜㅜ, (same function as T in Western style). Sometimes ㅡ (not anem-dash "—", but a vowel jamo), a comma (,) or anunderscore (_) is added, and the two character sets can be mixed together, as inㅠ.ㅡ,ㅡ^ㅜ andㅜㅇㅡ. Also, semicolons andcarets are commonly used in Korean emoticons; semicolons can mean sweating, examples of it are-;/,--^ and-_-;;.
The character 囧 (U+56E7), which means'bright', may be combined with the posture emoticon Orz, such as囧rz. The character existed inOracle bone script but was rarely used until its use as an emoticon,[59] documented as early as January 20, 2005.[60]
Other variants of 囧 include 崮 (king 囧), 莔 (queen 囧), 商 (囧 with a hat), 囧興 (turtle) and 卣 (Bomberman). The character 槑 (U+69D1), a variant of 梅'plum', is used to represent a double of 呆'dull' or further magnitude of dullness. In Chinese, normally full characters (as opposed to the stylistic use of 槑) might beduplicated to express emphasis.[citation needed]
The emoticonOrz resembles a person performing a Japanesedogeza bow.
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 calleddogeza), 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. Thisstick figure can represent respect orkowtowing, but commonly appears along a range of responses, including "frustration, despair, sarcasm, or grudging respect".[63]
It was first used in late 2002 at the forum on Techside, a Japanese personal website. At the "Techside FAQ Forum" (TECHSIDE教えて君BBS(教えてBBS)), a poster asked about a cable cover, typing "_|￣|○" to show a cable and its cover. Others commented that it looked like a kneeling person, and the symbol became popular.[64] These comments were soon deleted as they were considered off-topic. By 2005, Orz spawned asubculture: blogs have been devoted to the emoticon, andURL shortening services have been named after it. In Taiwan, Orz is associated with the concept ofnice guys.[61]
Aportmanteau ofemotion andsound, an emotisound is a brief sound transmitted and played back during the viewing of a message, typically an IM message or email message. The sound is intended to communicate an emotionalsubtext.[65] Some services, such as MuzIcons, combine emoticons and music players in anAdobe Flash-based widget.[66] In 2004, theTrillian chat application introduced a feature called "emotiblips", which allows Trillian users to stream files to their instant message recipients "as the voice and video equivalent of an emoticon".[67]
In 2007,MTV andParamount Home Entertainment promoted the "emoticlip" as a form ofviral marketing for the second season of the showThe Hills. The emoticlips were twelve short snippets of dialogue from the show, uploaded to YouTube. 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]
Patented drop down menu for composing phone mail text message with emoticons[69]
In 2000,Despair, Inc. obtained a U.S.trademark registration for the "frowny" emoticon:-( when used on "greeting cards, posters and art prints". In 2001, they issued a satirical press release, announcing that they would sue Internet users who typed the frowny; the company received protests when its mock release was posted on technology news websiteSlashdot.[70]
A number ofpatent applications have been filed on inventions that assist in communicating with emoticons. A few of these have been issued as USpatents. US 6987991,[69] for example, discloses a method developed in 2001 to send emoticons over a cell phone using a drop-down menu. The stated advantage was that iteases entering emoticons.[69]
The emoticon:-) was also filed in 2006 and registered in 2008 as a EuropeanCommunity Trademark (CTM). InFinland, theSupreme Administrative Court ruled in 2012 that the emoticon cannot be trademarked,[71] thus repealing a 2006 administrative decision trademarking the emoticons:-),=),=(,:) and:(.[72] In 2005, a Russian court rejected a legal claim againstSiemens by a man who claimed to hold a trademark on the;-) emoticon.[73] In 2008, Russian entrepreneur Oleg Teterin claimed to have been granted the trademark on the;-) emoticon. A license would not "cost that much—tens of thousands of dollars" for companies but would be free of charge for individuals.[73]
A different, but related, use of the term "emoticon" is found in theUnicode Standard, referring to a subset ofemoji 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.[75]
Some smiley faces were present in Unicode since1.1, including a whitefrowning face, a whitesmiling face and a black smiling face ("black" refers to a glyph which is filled, "white" refers to a glyph which is unfilled).[76]
2.^ Empty areas indicate code points assigned to non-emoticon characters
3.^ U+263A and U+263B are inherited from Microsoftcode page 437 introduced in 1981, although inspired by older systems
TheEmoticons block was introduced inUnicode Standardversion 6.0 (published in October 2010) and extended by7.0. It covers Unicode range from U+1F600 to U+1F64F fully.[77]
After that block had been filled,Unicode 8.0 (2015),9.0 (2016) and10.0 (2017) added additional emoticons in the range from U+1F910 to U+1F9FF. Currently, U+1F90C – U+1F90F, U+1F93F, U+1F94D – U+1F94F, U+1F96C – U+1F97F, U+1F998 – U+1F9CF (excluding U+1F9C0 which contains the🧀 emoji) and U+1F9E7 – U+1F9FF do not contain any emoticons since Unicode 10.0.
For historic and compatibility reasons, some other heads and figures, which mostly represent different aspects like genders, activities, and professions instead of emotions, are also found inMiscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs (especially U+1F466 – U+1F487) andTransport and Map Symbols. Body parts, mostly hands, are also encoded in theDingbat andMiscellaneous Symbols blocks.
^The transcript of the conversation between several computer scientists, includingDavid Touretzky,Guy Steele andJaime Carbonell,[34] was believed lost before it was recovered 20 years later from old backup tapes.[13]
^abcdefgEvans, Vyvyan (2017).The Emoji Code: The Linguistics Behind Smiley Faces and Scaredy Cats. New York: Picador. pp. 149–150.ISBN978-1-250-12906-2.
^abGiannoulis, Elena; Wilde, Lukas R. A., eds. (2019). "Emoticons, Kaomoji, and Emoji: The Transformation of Communication in the Digital Age".Emoticons,Kaomoji, and Emoji: The Transformation of Communication in the Digital Age. New York: Routledge.ISBN978-0-429-95884-7.The most commonly used emoticons, the 'smileys', have since become an integral part of digital communication.[page needed]
^Hey, Tony; Pápay, Gyuri (2014).The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution. Cambridge University Press. p. 241.ISBN978-1-316-12322-5.
^abcdSeargeant, Philip (2019).The Emoji Revolution: How Technology is Shaping the Future of Communication. Cambridge University Press. pp. 45–46.ISBN978-1-108-49664-3.The history of emoticons conventionally begins with the computer scientist Scott Fahlman who, in 1982, combined a colon, a hyphen and a round bracket as a way of indicating that a given statement was meant as a joke.
^Telegraphische Zeichenkunst.Deutschen Postzeitung, Vol. VII. (No. 22), 1896-11-16, p. 497)
^Bierce, Ambrose (1912)."For Brevity and Clarity".The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, XI: Antepenultimata. The Neale Publishing Company. pp. 386–387.
^The Harvard Lampoon, Vol. 112 No. 1, September 16, 1936, pp. 30–31.ISSN0017-8098
^New York Herald Tribune, 1953-03-10, p. 20, cols. 4–6.
^MAD Magazine No. 73, September 1962, pp. 36–37.ISSN0024-9319
^Kalantzis, Mary; Cope, Bill (2020).Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge University Press. p. 33.ISBN978-1-108-49534-9.
^Doliashvili, Mariam; Ogawa, Michael-Brian C.; Crosby, Martha E. (2020). "Understanding Challenges Presented Using Emojis as a Form of Augmented Communication". In Schmorrow, Dylan D.; Fidopiastis, Cali M. (eds.).Augmented Cognition. Theoretical and Technological Approaches. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 12196. Springer Nature. p. 26.doi:10.1007/978-3-030-50353-6_2.ISBN978-3-030-50353-6.S2CID220551348.Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, was credited with popularizing early text-based emoticons in 1982
^Veszelszki, Ágnes (2017).Digilect: The Impact of Infocommunication Technology on Language. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. pp. 131–132.ISBN978-3-11-049911-7.
^abStanton, Andrea L. (2014). "Islamic Emoticons: Pious Sociability and Community Building in Online Muslim Communities.". In Benski, Tova; Fisher, Eran (eds.).Internet and Emotions. New York: Routledge. p. 84.ISBN978-0-415-81944-2.
^Baron, Naomi (2009). "The myth of impoverished signal: Dispelling the spoken-language fallacy for emoticons in online communication.". In Vincent, Jane; Fortunati, Leopoldina (eds.).Electronic Emotion: The Mediation of Emotion via Information and Communication Technologies. Bern: Peter Lang. p. 112.ISBN978-3-03911-866-3.
^Danesi, Marcel (2016).The Semiotics of Emoji: The Rise of Visual Language in the Age of the Internet. Bloomsbury Publishing.ISBN978-1-4742-8200-0.[page needed]
^ab心情很orz嗎？ 網路象形文字幽默一下 [Feeling orz? Humor with Internet Hieroglyphics]. Nownews.com. January 20, 2005. Archived fromthe original on November 15, 2012. RetrievedMarch 14, 2013.
^Rodney H. Jones and Christoph A. Hafner,Understanding Digital Literacies: A Practical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2012), 126-27.ISBN9781136212888
^TECHSIDE FF11板の過去ログです [TECHSIDE FF11 board archives] (in Japanese). Archived fromthe original on April 30, 2003. RetrievedSeptember 17, 2018.＜正直＞アフターバーナー予約してしまいました_|￣|○←早速使ってみるw (12/23 00:20) ＜ルン＞/土下座_|￣| ○のび助 ···駄目だ、完全に遅れた (12/23 23:09)
^Tomić, Maja Katarina; Martinez, Marijana; Vrbanec, Tedo (2013)."Emoticons".ยืนยันอีเมลแล้วที่.1 (1): 41 – via Google Scholar.
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Walther, J. B.; D'Addario, K. P. (2001). "The impacts of emoticons on message interpretation in computer-mediated communication".Social Science Computer Review.19 (3):323–345.doi:10.1177/089443930101900307.ISSN0894-4393.S2CID16179750.
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