An emoticon (pronounced e-moh-ti-kon) is a textual portrayal of a writer's mood or facial expression. They are often used to alert a responder to the tenor or temper of a statement, and can change and improve interpretation of plain text. The word is a portmanteau of the English words emotion (or emote) and icon. In web forums, instant messengers and online games, text emoticons are often automatically replaced with small corresponding images, which came to be called emoticons as well. Examples of widely known emoticons are the smiley face :) and the frowny face :(

Early emoticons go back to the 1800s and commonly arose when casual/humorous writing was common. The emoticons on the Internet can largely be traced back to a proposal by Scott Fahlman in a message on 19 September 1982.

Antecedents

A transcript from Abraham Lincoln's speech written in 1862 appears to contain a "winking" emoticon, but it is unclear whether it is an actual use, a typo or a legitimate grammatical construct.

Typographical emoticons were published in 1881 by the U.S. satirical magazine Puck. In 1912 Ambrose Bierce proposed "an improvement in punctuation — the snigger point, or note of cachinnation: it is written thus \___/! and presents a smiling mouth. It is to be appended, with the full stop, exclamation mark as Bierce's later example used to every jocular or ironical sentence".

Emoticons had already come into use in sci-fi fandom in the 1940s, although there seems to have been a lapse in cultural continuity between the communities.

It has been widely reported and copied across the Internet that an early instance of using text characters to represent a sideways smiling (and frowning) face occurred in an ad for the MGM movie Lili in the New York Herald Tribune, March 10, 1953, page 20, cols. 4-6. (See "Creation of :-) and :-(" section below.)

However, the above is incorrect. The advert does not in fact use text characters, but instead uses a hand-drawn "Smiley" with the normal orientation. This can be confirmed by visiting the New York City public library where a copy of the newspaper for that day is held on microfilm, which can be requested online at http://www.nypl.org/express/.

In 1963 the "smiley face", a yellow button with two black dots representing eyes and an upturned thick curve representing a mouth, was created by freelance artist Harvey Ball. It was realized on order of a large insurance company as part of a campaign to bolster the morale of its employees and soon became a big hit. This smiley presumably inspired many later emoticons; the most basic graphic emoticon that depicts this is in fact a small yellow smiley face.