The word emoticon is a combination of the words emotion and icon. Emoticons are used online to create voice intonation or inflection, body gestures, and emotion behind statements that might otherwise be misunderstood.
A smiley face is the most common emoticon.
The most common emoticon is a smiley face, made with the colon instead of the eyes, and the left parenthesis as the smile, viewed at a 90-degree angle. 🙂
Emoticons can be used to convey intonation or body gestures.
A hyphen is sometimes used between the eyes and the mouth to indicate a nose. 🙂
This emoticon is usually used to convey happiness, joy, jocularity or jocularity. To see the difference an emoticon can make, just look at the following two statements:
Yes James, you sounded like a real geek. either…
Yes James, you seemed like a real geek. 🙂
Whether or not James considers being a “geek” a badge of honor or an insult, the first statement without the emoticon surely seems meant to be an insult. The second statement, however, with its smiling face, is clearly meant to be interpreted in a playful manner and is not likely to cause offence.
Emoticons play an important role in online communication because the vast majority of people who communicate have never met or don’t know each other well. Misreading intentions is all too easy without the facial expressions and verbal inflections that face-to-face communication provides.
With the popularity of the smiley emoticon, other emoticons quickly emerged. Sometimes an emoticon becomes popular in a certain newsgroup or webgroup, but is not known outside of that group. Other emoticons have become part of the international language of the Internet.
Some common emoticons include:
🙁 frown
😉 wink
: (” ” crying
> 🙂 mischievous smile
:-/ mischievous or confused smile
😛 smiling and sticking out the tongue
😀 laughing a lot
>:- crazy
The smile and frown emoticons were first suggested by computer scientist Scott Fahlman on September 19, 1982. Fahlman’s post, on a Carnegie Mellon University message board, was removed from the archives on September 10. 2002 to clear up the old rumor that they originated with him. Some believe that emoticons were previously used by other parties as well. In any case, it seems clear that they should be part of our online vernacular.
Along the same lines, there are other shortcuts for conveying emotions: = smile, = big smile, and = very big smile! Some other acronyms commonly seen online along with emoticons are:
LOL Laughing Out Loud
ROTFL rolling on the ground laughing
BFN bye for now
TTYL talk later
IMO in my opinion
IMHO IMHO
IMNSHO in my not so humble opinion
IIRC if I remember correctly
IAC in any case
OTOH on the other hand
FWIW for what it’s worth
hth hope it helps
Emoticons and acronyms are part of the Internet jargon and are evolving as the Internet evolves. And as this fascinating medium that has brought complete strangers together from all over the world continues to enlighten, delight and educate us, emoticons will be there as little ambassadors to help make our intentions clear!
Emoticons are usually simple images meant to convey emotion.
