You get an email from a friend and at the end of a sentence you see a strange little symbol that resembles a face. What does it mean? Emoticons, using the keys on the keyboard to make faces and objects, have been around as long as people have been messing with the computer. Some people have drawn entire pictures using keys as brush strokes.
For someone not really techno savvy it may be difficult to know exactly what the little face represents. Many word and or mail programs have the emoticons already built in for you. In yahoo mail, you can press a smiley face and one will appear in your note. There are also emoticon programs that can be downloaded to your computer and phone. They are cute, fun to look at, and fun to figure out.
List of Common Emoticons
The following lists some of the more common emoticons that are easy to do. The list is not exclusive and some of the emoticons might mean something differently than how I have interpreted them. Please use the comment section to add any others that are used in your correspondences.
- :-) means happy
- :-< miserable, frowning
- 8-) wearing glasses
- ;-) means winking
- :-)== man
- :’-( crying
- :-# braces
- :-O uh-oh
- :-& tongue-tied
- l-O yawning
- :-> smirking
- {:-)toupee
- {{{}}}} thinking
- [:-] robot
- 3:] pet
- $-) greedy
- @--)-- flower
- :-)X wearing a bowtie
- :-( sad
- :-D joking
- :-X it’s a secret
- 8:-) girl
- :-@ screaming
- :-{} wearing lipstick
- 0:-) angel
- :-{) mustache
- :-P sticking tongue out
Difficult Emoticons and their Meanings
These are all fairly simple and even the most basic of word programs have the smiley face emoticon when you type the colon, hyphen, parenthesis combination. As stated earlier some people can get quite creative when putting together symbols to get a point across.
It is usually easy to figure out what the message is when glancing at the symbols. For example, (:::[]:::), is a Band-Aid. Looks like one doesn’t it? And the symbols <0(---) << are suppose to represent a fish. Not quite so obvious.
So emoticons come with a little bit of a creative license that allows the typists the freedom to hope that the person on the viewing end understands the message. < :-) ~, this is supposed to represent a mouse, and while it does resemble one it seems easier to just type the word mouse. A friend recently emailed this emoticon at the end of a funny email to me, @ (*O*) @.... when I asked what it meant he said it was a koala bear.
After he told me, I could see how it was one but I didn’t understand the purpose behind it. I guess that is the point with emoticons, both writer and reader should get the message otherwise it is pointless and makes the reader want to say #@&*&##@!!!!
Brenda Gargus - Brenda Gargus has a Masters' degree in Psychology and an undergraduate degree in Education. She has taught for 29 years in a variety of ...
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