Emoticon

=Emoticon=

Author: Chan Ju Kim

The word emoticon is a combined word of emotion (or emote) and icon. In the past, when people did not have this thing called emoticon, they couldn't express their expressions to the others. So, as an altenative way of showing their facial emotions, people developed the emoticon. Emoticons started as a set of letters and symbols such as w T ^ -_-. Here are some examples of emoticons. (T_T) which is an emoticon for sadness, (^_^), and (^3^), which is an emoticon for smile, and so on.

There are several kinds of emoticon in each country. For example, in South Korea, there are emoticons like ㅠㅠ,ㅇㅅㅇ,ㄱㅡ,ㅡㅠㅡ, and so on. In Japan, there are emoticons like (´ ω `)+, ど(-_-)う, and so on that can express several kinds of expressions. Since the letters of each country is different, there are different kinds of emoticon!

Lastly, to talk about the history of the emoticon, it started in 1857, when the //National Telegraphic Review and Operators Guide// used the number 73 of the Morse codes as love and kisses. As time passed, as the usage of emoticon became more often, the numbers of emoticon increased, too. In 1979, Kevin Mackenzie used :-) in his mail, which now became one of the most famous emoticons of the world. Later, in the online games, instant messengers, and web forums, the text emoticons were replaced with graphic emoticons. Now, graphic emoticons became so popular that people would make sundry kinds of emoticons like moving emoticons, yellow face emoticions and so on.