Emoticons

Emotion + icon = Emoticon :)

Type a colon followed by a hyphen. Add a closing parenthesis. Turn your head to the left, and what do you see? You're right, a smiling face : -)

Type a colon followed by a hyphen. Add an opening parenthesis. Turn your head, and what do you see? You're right again, a frowning face : -( These little pictures made with punctuation marks are called "smilies" or "emoticons," and they are popularly used in e-mail and news groups. They let the reader know how you feel about what you're writing. When you speak to someone, you usually express your emotions by your face, tone of voice, or even body language. But when you write, your reader can't see you, so you let the little smiley face (or frowning face) relay your feelings for you.

Dr. Scott E. Fahlman, a renowned research computer scientist with Carnegie Mellon University, is credited with creating the first smiley September 19, 1982. To find out more about his invention and how it grew, visit his site at http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm. Dr. Fahlman relates how the idea developed and how it caused a "digital archeological" search for his message that first used two of his original smiley faces.

No one knows the exact number of emoticons that have been created to date, but some sources claim the number to be more than 1,000 and increasing every day.