Emoticon

Pictorial representation of a facial expression

An emoticon (ə-MOH-tə-kon, rarely , ih-MOTT-ih-kon; portmanteau of emotion and icon) is a pictorial representation of a facial expression using characters—usually punctuation marks, numbers and letters—to express a person's feelings, mood or reaction, without needing to describe it in detail. ASCII emoticons can be traced back hundreds of years with various one-off uses. The protocol as a way to use them to communicate emotion in conversations is credited to computer scientist Scott Fahlman, who proposed what came to be known as "smileys"—:-) and :-(—in a message on the bulletin board system (BBS) of Carnegie Mellon University in 1982.

From Wikipedia, under CC BY-SA. More on occurri.