Emoticons

An emoticon is Internet slang coined from a combination of emotion and icon. Sometimes emoticons are also referred to as smileys, even though they represent a wide range of emotions, not just happiness. They represent human facial expressions and are widely used in email, instant messaging, chatting, bulletin boards and forums on the net. A verticon (vertical icon) refers to the East Asian style of emoticons.

A smile is represented by a colon, hyphen and a bracket. These symbols form a smiley and stand for the eyes, nose and mouth, respectively. Sometimes when creating emoticons, the symbol for the nose is disregarded and the text used to create the eyes can be changed. Semi colons or equal signs can be used to symbolize the eyes.

It was Scott Fahlman who came up with a scheme in 1981 for encoding and conveying feelings in small text glyphs. He said that it would be good to use the combination of the colon, hyphen and brackets as joke markers or to indicate serious matters. (-: or )-: .

Emoticons are used to denote expressions and convey emotional cues when the communication is being done in text form. Certain statements can be misinterpreted when used without emoticons because there is not basis for gauging the emotion that accompanied the statement. When speaking face to face, we use body language to help determine whether a statement is said seriously or in jest; when chatting online, an emoticon can accomplish the same goal.

Western style emoticons are typed or written from left to right, East Asian style emoticons are more known as verticons. You don’t need to tilt your head to the left to be able to read the emoticon. A typical character would be (*_*) where the asterisks symbolize the eyes, the underscore stands for the mouth and the parentheses give the face a distinct shape.

Posture emoticons are spawns of the original emoticons. They are still readable from left to right but they don’t show facial expression. They indicate the person’s posture and show representations for the head, arms and legs.