ASCII art and faces (pre-1981) '', text of a legal ruling against it in the shape of a
pear, 1834 In 1648, poet
Robert Herrick wrote, "Tumble me down, and I will sit Upon my ruins, (smiling yet:)." Herrick's work predated any other recorded use of
brackets as a smiling face by around 200 years. However, experts doubted the inclusion of the
colon in the poem was deliberate and if it was meant to represent a smiling face. English professor Alan Jacobs argued that "punctuation, in general, was unsettled in the seventeenth century ... Herrick was unlikely to have consistent punctuational practices himself, and even if he did he couldn't expect either his printers or his readers to share them." 17th century typography practice often placed colons and semicolons within parentheses, including 14 instances of "" in
Richard Baxter's 1653
Plain Scripture Proof of Infants Church-membership and Baptism. Precursors to modern emoticons have existed since the 19th century. The
National Telegraphic Review and Operators Guide in April 1857 documented the use of the number 73 in
Morse code to express "love and kisses" (later reduced to the more formal "
best regards"). ''Dodge's Manual'' in 1908 documented the reintroduction of "love and kisses" as the number 88. New Zealand academics Joan Gajadhar and John Green comment that both
Morse code abbreviations are more succinct than modern abbreviations such as
LOL. 's speech in 1862 The transcript of one of
Abraham Lincoln's speeches in 1862 recorded the audience's reaction as: "(applause and laughter ;)". There has been some debate whether the glyph in Lincoln's speech was a
typo, a legitimate punctuation construct or the first emoticon. Linguist Philip Seargeant argues that it was a simple
typesetting error. '' on March 30, 1881 Before March 1881, the examples of "typographical art" appeared in at least three newspaper articles, including
Kurjer warszawski (published in
Warsaw) from March 5, 1881, using punctuation to represent the emotions of joy, melancholy, indifference and astonishment. In a 1912 essay titled "For Brevity and Clarity", American author
Ambrose Bierce suggested facetiously that a bracket could be used to represent a smiling face, proposing "an improvement in punctuation" with which writers could convey
cachinnation, loud or immoderate laughter: "it is written thus ‿ and presents a smiling mouth. It is to be appended, with the full stop, to every jocular or ironical sentence". In a 1936
Harvard Lampoon article, writer Alan Gregg proposed combining brackets with various other
punctuation marks to represent various moods. Brackets were used for the sides of the mouth or cheeks, with other punctuation used between the brackets to display various emotions: for a smile, (showing more "teeth") for laughter, for a frown and for a
wink. An instance of text characters representing a sideways smiling and frowning face could be found in the
New York Herald Tribune on March 10, 1953, promoting the film
Lili starring
Leslie Caron. The September 1962 issue of
MAD magazine included an article titled "Typewri-toons". The piece, featuring typewriter-generated artwork credited to "Royal Portable", was entirely made up of repurposed typography, including a capital letter P having a bigger 'bust' than a capital I, a lowercase b and d discussing their pregnancies, an
asterisk on top of a letter to indicate the letter had just come inside from snowfall, and a classroom of lowercase n's interrupted by a lowercase h "raising its hand". A further example attributed to a
Baltimore Sunday Sun columnist appeared in a 1967 article in ''
Reader's Digest'', using a
dash and
right bracket to represent a
tongue in one's cheek: ). Prefiguring the modern "smiley" emoticon, writer
Vladimir Nabokov told an interviewer from
The New York Times in 1969, "I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile—some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question." In the 1970s, the
PLATO IV computer system was launched. It was one of the first computers used throughout educational and professional institutions, but rarely used in a residential setting. On the computer system, a student at the
University of Illinois developed pictograms that resembled different smiling faces.
Mary Kalantzis and
Bill Cope stated this likely took place in 1972, and they claimed these to be the first emoticons.
ASCII emoticons - First generation (1982–mid-1990s) In 1982,
Carnegie Mellon computer scientist
Scott Fahlman is generally credited with the protocol of communicating and portraying emotion in written text. The use of
ASCII symbols, a standard set of codes representing typographical marks, was essential to allow the symbols to be displayed on any computer. In Carnegie Mellon's
bulletin board system, Fahlman proposed colon–
hyphen–right bracket as a label for "attempted humor" to try to solve the difficulty of conveying
humor or
sarcasm in plain text. Fahlman sent the following message after an incident where a humorous warning about a
mercury spill in an elevator was misunderstood as serious: 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 :-( Within a few months, the smiley had spread to the
ARPANET and
Usenet. Other suggestions on the forum included an
asterisk and an
ampersand , the latter meant to represent a person doubled over in laughter, as well as a
percent sign and a
pound sign . Scott Fahlman suggested that not only could his emoticon communicate
emotion, but also replace language. and have inspired a variety of other emoticons, including the "winking" face using a
semicolon , , a representation of the
Face with Tears of Joy emoji and the acronym "
LOL". In 1996,
The Smiley Company was established by Nicolas Loufrani and his father Franklin as a way of commercializing the
smiley trademark. As part of this, The Smiley Dictionary website was launched and had a focus on ASCII emoticons, where available emoticons were catalogued. In total more than 500 were recorded. Notably this catalog removed the dash ( - ) for a nose and just had eyes and a mouth. The reasoning behind this was to make the ASCII emoticons more like the
smiley, which resulted in :) instead of :-). The shortening or redesign of ASCII emoticons has not been covered in enough depth to know where the shorter versions originated, but The Smiley Dictionary could have as a minimum influenced the way ASCII emoticons are used today. Many other people did similar to Loufrani from 1995 onwards, including David Sanderson creating the book
Smileys in 1997. James Marshall also hosted an online collection of ASCII emoticons that he completed in 2008. In 1998, the book Le Dico Smiley was also published. A researcher at
Stanford University surveyed the emoticons used in four million
Twitter messages and found that the smiling emoticon without a hyphen "nose" was much more common than the original version with the hyphen . Linguist
Vyvyan Evans argues that this represents a shift in usage by younger users as a form of
covert prestige: rejecting a standard usage in order to demonstrate in-group membership.
Portrait emoticons - Second generation (1990s–present) Nicolas Loufrani began to use the basic text designs and turned them into graphical representations, which are now known as portrait emoticons. His designs were registered at the
United States Copyright Office in 1997 and appeared online as
GIF files in 1998. For ASCII emoticons that did not exist to convert into graphical form, Loufrani also backward engineered new ASCII emoticons from the graphical versions he created. These were the first graphical representations of ASCII emoticons. Not only did these portrait emoticons portray existing and new ASCII emoticons, but also new features were added, such as
hand gestures in the form of white gloves. These have since become standalone
emojis along with other emojis that have replaced words in text communication. In 2001, he published his emoticon set online on the Smiley Dictionary. and was published as a book called
Dico Smileys in 2002. In 2017, British magazine
The Drum referred to Loufrani as the "godfather of the emoji" for his work in the field. The first American company to take notice of
emojis was
Google beginning in 2007. In August 2007, a team made up of
Mark Davis and his colleagues Kat Momoi and Markus Scherer began petitioning the
Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) in an attempt to standardise the emoji. The UTC, having previously deemed emoji to be out of scope for Unicode, made the decision to broaden its scope to enable compatibility with the Japanese cellular carrier formats which were becoming more widespread. Peter Edberg and Yasuo Kida joined the collaborative effort from
Apple Inc. shortly after, and their official UTC proposal came in January 2009 with 625 new emoji characters. In recent times, emoticons,
emojis and
smileys have often become intertwined and confused.
Emojis represent the largest set of graphical communication, but they often include portrait emoticons. In fact, the majority of the most commonly used Emoji are emoticons (because they represent an emotion). In 2024, the
BBC reported that 2 of the top 3 emojis were portrait emoticons. On September 23, 2021, it was announced that
Scott Fahlman was holding an auction for the original emoticons he created in 1982. The auction was held in
Dallas, United States, and sold the two designs as
non-fungible tokens (NFT). The online auction ended later that month, with the originals selling for
US$237,500. A year later in 2022,
The Smiley Company auctioned off an
NFT of 42 original graphical emoticon on
World Emoji Day. The proceeds of the sale went to the company's non-profit arm, Smiley Movement. In some
programming languages, certain operators are known informally by their emoticon-like appearance. This includes the
Spaceship operator <=> (a comparison), the
Diamond operator <> (for type hinting) and the
Elvis operator ?: (a shortened
ternary operator). ==Styles==