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Emoticons

Faces and signs typed with ordinary characters, such as the shrug and the heart, what each stands for and where it came from.

Emoticons are faces and small pictures typed with ordinary keyboard characters. This section has three: the shrug ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, the heart <3 and the happy eyes ^^. Each page says which characters the emoticon is made of, what people use it to mean, as the dictionaries and writers who have looked at it report, and where it came from as far as that is recorded. Internet slang written in letters, such as uwu or xd, is not covered.

The first emoticons

Encyclopaedia Britannica gives the first substantiated use of an emoticon to the computer scientist Scott E. Fahlman, on 19 September 1982. He suggested :-) for humorous posts on a message board and :-( for serious ones; his post, kept by Carnegie Mellon University, ends “Read it sideways.” The heart, <3, belongs to the same family. Dictionary.com places it among the emoticons of early email, text messaging, instant messaging and online forums, and says that once Unicode 6.0 supported emoji in 2010, many people switched to the red heart emoji ❤️. Typing <3 now, it adds, often calls to mind the earlier days of the internet.

Sideways and upright

Western emoticons such as :-) lie on their side and change the mouth to change the mood. Faces like ^_^ stand upright and change the eyes. Jaram Park and colleagues, who studied 1.1 billion tweets, call these the horizontal and vertical styles, and found ^^ the only vertical emoticon among the ten most used. Korean users chose the vertical style 74% of the time, while Japanese users used both styles to a similar extent. A 2007 study reported by the University of Alberta found that Japanese participants looked to the eyes of an emoticon to judge its emotion, and that Japanese emoticons for happy and sad, (^_^) and (;_;), vary the eyes where American ones vary the mouth.

Kyle Chayka, writing in The Awl, calls faces that borrow Japanese characters kaomoji, “face mark” in Japanese. The shrug is one: its face is ツ, which Unicode names KATAKANA LETTER TU, or TSU. Emojipedia notes that the shrug is not an emoji but a combination of Unicode characters. The emoji 🤷, a single character that Unicode names SHRUG, was approved in Unicode 9.0 in 2016.

Sources

  1. emoticon, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Introduction
  2. The original smiley post, 19 September 1982, Carnegie Mellon smiley pages (bulletin-board thread recovered from backup tapes), Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science, Original post
  3. <3 (Dictionary.com Emoji Dictionary), Dictionary.com Emoji Dictionary, 25 April 2018, Dictionary.com, Entry text
  4. Emoticon Style: Interpreting Differences in Emoticons Across Cultures, Jaram Park, Vladimir Barash, Clay Fink and Meeyoung Cha, Proceedings of ICWSM 7 (2013), 466–475, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Introduction; Table 2; Results
  5. Culture Is Key To Interpreting Facial Emotions, News release, 5 April 2007, on Yuki, Maddux and Masuda (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2007), University of Alberta, via ScienceDaily, Release text
  6. The Life and Times of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, Kyle Chayka, 20 May 2014, The Awl, Article text
  7. Katakana, Range: 30A0–30FF (code chart), The Unicode Standard, Version 18.0, Unicode Consortium, Katakana, 30C3–30C4
  8. Shruggie, Emojipedia page, read September 2026, Emojipedia, Page text
  9. Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs, Range: 1F900–1F9FF (code chart), The Unicode Standard, Unicode Consortium, Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs, 1F937
  10. Person Shrugging Emoji Meaning, Emojipedia emoji page, read September 2026, Emojipedia, Emoji meaning

Last reviewed October 1, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research