Happy 25th, Emoticon :)

by Victoria Revay | March 15, 2007 at 09:40 am

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Emotive icons, better known as emoticons or facial expressions made by certain series of keystrokes are celebrating 25 years of making people on the net smile :-) or not :-(.

Back in 1969, author Vladimir Nabokov said that "there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile-- some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket." Well, nearly 40-years later, we can hardly live our lives without expressing our emotions online with emoticons. Here is an extensive library of emoticons, which one do you use the most? Do you have a favourite emoticon?

It's hard to believe that the emoticon turns 25 this week -- I recall learning about them back in 1995 after stupidly asking a friend why he signed all of his e-mails with a colon and a parenthesis.

The origin of the ASCII smiley face is typically traced to September 1982, when Scott Fahlman, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Computer Science, suggested that the :-) symbol be used in the subject line of an online bulletin board post to denote a humorous or non-serious topic.