Emoticon

An emoticon (, ə-MOH-tə-kon, rarely , ih-MOTT-ih-kon; portmanteau of emotion and icon) is a pictorial representation of a facial expression using characters—usually punctuation marks, numbers and letters—to express a person's feelings, mood or reaction, without needing to describe it in detail.

ASCII emoticons can be traced back hundreds of years with various one-off uses. The protocol as a way to use them to communicate emotion in conversations is credited to computer scientist Scott Fahlman, who proposed what came to be known as "smileys"—:-) and :-(—in a message on the bulletin board system (BBS) of Carnegie Mellon University in 1982. In Western countries, emoticons are usually written at a right angle to the direction of the text. Users from Japan popularized a kind of emoticon called kaomoji, using Japanese's larger character sets. This style arose on ASCII NET of Japan in 1986. They are also known as verticons (from vertical emoticon) due to their readability without rotations. This is often seen as the 1st generation of emoticons.

The second generation began when computing became more common in the west, and people began replacing the previous ASCII art with actual emoticon icons or designs. One term used to define these types of emoticons compared to ASCII was portrait emoticons, as portrait emoticons are meant to resemble a face from the front like a portrait painting.