Definition:
ASCII character used in online writing to indicate a writer's mood or attitude.
Etymology:
From emot(ion) + icon.Examples and Observations:
- :-( (sadness)
- </3 (a broken heart)
- :@ (anger)
- :-O (surprise)
- "Emoticons, the smiling, winking and frowning faces that inhabit the computer keyboard, have not only hung around long past their youth faddishness of the 1990s, but they have grown up. Twenty-five years after they were invented as a form of computer-geek shorthand, emoticons--an open-source form of pop art that has evolved into a quasi-accepted form of punctuation--are now ubiquitous. . . .
"There was a time, of course, that emoticons seemed intrinsically youthful. Just as children shared the special ability to see Big Bird’s magical friend Snuffleupagus on Sesame Street--a character who was long supposed to be invisible to adults--they seemed to easily recognize that the characters 3:-o represented a cow, or that @>--> -- symbolized a rose or that ~(_8^(I) stood for Homer Simpson.
"But after 25 years of use, emoticons have started to jump off the page and into our spoken language. Even grown men on Wall Street, for example, will weave the term 'QQ' (referring to an emoticon that symbolizes two eyes crying) into conversation as a sarcastic way of saying 'boo hoo.' . . .
"Though we think of emoticons, or 'smileys,' as an Internet-era phenomenon, their earliest ancestors were created on typewriters. In 1912, the writer Ambrose Bierce proposed a new punctuation device called a 'snigger point,' a smiling face represented by \__/!, to connote jocularity."
(Alex Williams, "(-: Just Between You and Me ;-)" The New York Times, July 29, 2007)
Pronunciation: ee-MOTE-i-kon
Also Known As: a smiley
