Emoticon Totally Explained

Everything about O totally explained

A portmanteau of the English words emotion (or emote) and icon, an emoticon is a symbol or combination of symbols used to convey emotional content in written or message form.

History

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. Gajadhar and Green comment that both Morse code abbreviations are more succinct than modern abbreviations such as LOL.
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's written thus ^ for very happy. Occasionally, emoticons will be strung together in series to show movement. For example: <(^_^<) <(^_^)^ ^(^_^)^ ^(^_^)> (>^_^)> Some variations on the "Kirby" include:

(>'.')>
t(^.^t)
t(-.-t)
(>'.')>
<('.'<)
t('.'t)

2channel style

The Japanese language is usually encoded using double-byte character codes. As a result there's a bigger variety of characters that can be used in emoticons, many of which can't be reproduced in ASCII. Most kaomoji contain Cyrillic and other foreign letters to create even more complicated expressions analogous to ASCII art's level of complexity. To type such emoticons, the input editor that's used to type Japanese on a user's system is equipped with a dictionary of emoticons, after which the user simply types the Japanese word (or something close to it) that represents the desired emoticon to convert the input into such complicated emoticons. Such expressions are known as Shift JIS art.
Users of 2channel in particular have developed a wide variety of unique emoticons using obscure characters. Some have taken on a life of their own and become characters in their own right, like Mona.

Graphic emoticons

Graphic emoticons (small images that often automatically replace typed text) are commonly used instead of the older text variants, especially on Internet forums and instant messenger (IM) programs. These are often heavily animated, some taking up to at least a full five seconds to fully loop, and sometimes (mostly on IMs) with sound embedded, to bring it to full life.

Emotisounds

A portmanteau of emotion and sound, an emotisound is a brief sound transmitted and played back during the viewing of a message, typically an IM message or e-mail message. The sound is intended to communicate an emotional subtext.

Video EmotiClips

There has been a recent emergence of very short video clips, now referred to as EmotiClips that's a video snippet containing an expression of emotion. It can be shared on websites, in emails, and through mobile phone messaging to express feelings – not unlike a video greeting card. This new form of communication has been used recently by MTV and Paramount Home Entertainment to promote the arrival of MTV’s The Hills. This idea and design for EmotiClips were inspired by emoticons but created by an ad firm.

Intellectual property rights related to emoticons

In 2000, Despair, Inc. obtained a U.S. trademark registration for the "frowny" emoticon :-( when used on "greeting cards, posters and art prints." In 2001, they issued a satirical press release, announcing that they'd sue Internet users who typed the frowny; the joke backfired and the company received a storm of protest when its mock release was posted at technology news website Slashdot. A number of patent applications have been filed on inventions that assist in communicating with emoticons. A few of these have issued as US patents. , for example, discloses a method developed in 2001 to send emoticons over a cell phone using a drop down menu. The advantage over the prior art was that the user saved on the number of keystrokes.
In Finland, the emoticons :-), =), =(:) and :(were trademarked in 2006 for use with various products and services.

Further Information

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