emotikon

Emotikon, a term often rendered as emoticon in English, is a textual representation of a human facial expression used to convey emotion in electronic communication. It typically consists of ASCII punctuation marks and letters arranged to resemble a face, such as :-) for a smile or :-( for sadness. In some languages the word emotikon is common, and kaomoji refers to a related form that uses non-Latin characters to create more elaborate expressions, for example (＾▽＾) or (╯°□°)╯.

The concept emerged with computer‑mediated communication in the early online networks. The best‑known milestone is the 1982 proposal by Scott Fahlman to use :-) and :-( on a bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University to mark jokes and serious posts. From there, ASCII emoticons spread widely across email, Usenet, chat, and forums. With the expansion of Unicode and the rise of graphical emoji in the late 1990s and 2000s, emotikons remained common in plain‑text environments, while emoji became the dominant pictorial alternative in many interfaces.

In practice, emotikons serve to convey affect, tone, or intent that may be difficult to interpret in plain text alone. They vary across cultures and platforms, with horizontal, punctuation‑based forms common in Western contexts and a broader repertoire of kaomoji forms popular in East Asia. Today, emotikons persist as a lightweight, language‑independent means of expressing emotion in digital writing, complementing or, in some settings, yielding to emoji.