Icon Face
A smiley face is a facial expression, or emotion in text conversations. Learn how to read and make your own smiley faces or emoji.
A smiley face is ordinary keyboard characters used in text-based communications to represent a human facial expression. The smiley face is used to convey emotion, much in the same way we use facial expressions when we communicate with people face-to-face. Despite its simplicity, it helps others to correctly interpret your intent and meaning in online conversations. A smiley face may also be called a text smiley, smiley or emoticon.
Recommended Reading: Looking for the Huge List of Texting and Online Chat Abbreviations?
Smiley Face Checklist
Scroll through the smiley face and emoticon article or jump to a specific topic of interest using the quick links below.
IBM Security: Future of Identity
In the same way that a person's voice or facial expression changes when having a conversation, a smiley face is used to achieve the same result in text-based chats. These simple symbols tells people that you are smiling, laughing, upset or not very happy with the conversation that is currently taking place in text.
Recommended Reading: Looking for the Huge List of Texting and Online Chat Abbreviations?
Smiley Face Checklist
Scroll through the smiley face and emoticon article or jump to a specific topic of interest using the quick links below.
IBM Security: Future of Identity
In the same way that a person's voice or facial expression changes when having a conversation, a smiley face is used to achieve the same result in text-based chats. These simple symbols tells people that you are smiling, laughing, upset or not very happy with the conversation that is currently taking place in text.
Examples of Text Smileys
If you were joking with someone and sent a text message saying "get a life" the person receiving the message might think you are being rude with your comment. If you send the same message with a happy smiley face symbol : ) the person would take that to mean you were smiling when you sent the message and know you were joking with them. In a face-to-face communication you would laugh or really smile to convey the "I'm joking around or kidding with you" emotion. A sad face usually indicates you are sad or upset. People might also send a sad face text message if they don't agree with something you wrote.
How to Create a Smiley
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The First Smiley Face: History of the Symbol
The idea and first use of a text smiley face is credited to Scott Elliott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. He thought using smile and frown text symbols would help message board users distinguish between serious posts and jokes. The message detailing the use of the smiley emoticons was posted in September, 1982. In this article, Smiley Lore :-), Fahlman describes why he felt there was a need to mark posts that contributors did not intend to be taken seriously by others reading the message board:
"This problem caused some of us to suggest (only half seriously) that maybe it would be a good idea to explicitly mark posts that were not to be taken seriously. After all, when using text-based online communication, we lack the body language or tone-of-voice cues that convey this information when we talk in person or on the phone. Various "joke markers" were suggested, and in the midst of that discussion it occurred to me that the character sequence :-) would be an elegant solution – one that could be handled by the ASCII-based computer terminals of the day."
If you were joking with someone and sent a text message saying "get a life" the person receiving the message might think you are being rude with your comment. If you send the same message with a happy smiley face symbol : ) the person would take that to mean you were smiling when you sent the message and know you were joking with them. In a face-to-face communication you would laugh or really smile to convey the "I'm joking around or kidding with you" emotion. A sad face usually indicates you are sad or upset. People might also send a sad face text message if they don't agree with something you wrote.
How to Create a Smiley
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The First Smiley Face: History of the Symbol
The idea and first use of a text smiley face is credited to Scott Elliott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. He thought using smile and frown text symbols would help message board users distinguish between serious posts and jokes. The message detailing the use of the smiley emoticons was posted in September, 1982. In this article, Smiley Lore :-), Fahlman describes why he felt there was a need to mark posts that contributors did not intend to be taken seriously by others reading the message board:
"This problem caused some of us to suggest (only half seriously) that maybe it would be a good idea to explicitly mark posts that were not to be taken seriously. After all, when using text-based online communication, we lack the body language or tone-of-voice cues that convey this information when we talk in person or on the phone. Various "joke markers" were suggested, and in the midst of that discussion it occurred to me that the character sequence :-) would be an elegant solution – one that could be handled by the ASCII-based computer terminals of the day."