I have always been fascinated by those cute faces you see attached to an e-mail… most of the times it’s yellow, but sometimes its green, red in fact it can sport any other color you can think off….

I searched google today for smileys and found this site. It offers various smileys, or should I say emoticons for use by just anybody. The explanation on the difference between a smiley and an emoticon is a bit funny but is also factual. Read on…

I will try to explain the difference between an emoticon and a smiley. Some people believe these are the same, but they are absolutely not. You could use this page as a reference whenever you have this - damn, what was it again - feeling.

The fairy tale: somewhere in September 1982 a college student posted the following message on a Bulletin board. The smiley was invented. A small milestone in modern communication.
19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman

I propose that the following character sequence 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

:-(
Pretty cool, isn't it. A simple post on a board and you invented something that millions of people use and see every day. He should be a rich man.

As you can conclude in Scott's post, he defines the smiley as a character. So it is all very simple, a smiley is a group of keyboard characters that take on facial expression to express an emotion in text based communication.

The modern variant of the smiley is what we call an emoticon. Emoticons are graphical little images. Remember the keyword in the previous sentence, graphical.


The use of emoticons nowadays is very widespread. Every forum has it's own set of emoticons. The same goes with instant messaging programs as MSN Messenger, YIM, AIM, ICQ and dozens more.
Special programs have been developed to easily insert those fancy emoticons in emails. It's almost a whole industry.

If I make a summary of the text above it would be something like this:

Smiley :Text character to express an emotion

Emoticon :Graphical image to express an emotion


It's almost too simple, isn't it ;-).

Very informative right! I guess I’d be using more of these emoticons later on. Here are some great samples:

Created: Wednesday, November 30, 2005

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