Frowny :-(

How to read it

Fahlman’s post of 19 September 1982 said it was probably “more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes”, and offered :-( for them. He writes that the symbol “quickly evolved into a marker for displeasure, frustration, or anger.” Encyclopaedia Britannica lists :( as conveying sadness, with :-(, :’( and ;-; as variations; the apostrophe in :’( adds a tear. As with the Smiley :-), the form without a nose is much the commoner: in Tyler Schnoebelen’s sample of American English tweets from 2011, :( was in 8.3% of the tweets carrying one of the 28 commonest emoticons and :-( in 0.7%.

Also searched as: :(, :-(, frowny face, sad face emoticon, what does :( mean.

From serious to sad

Fahlman meant :-( to say “this is serious”, the opposite of his joke marker :-). He says it soon came to mean displeasure, frustration or anger instead, and Britannica, crediting it to Fahlman too, now gives sadness as its meaning.

A sad face beside a laugh

The face and the words around it can disagree. Jaram Park and colleagues, studying tweets, found “haha” among the words that most often came with :(, as it did with smiling emoticons, and gave the example of a reply that ends “haha. :( Maybe next time.” They suggest the contrast between the words and the face can mark sarcasm or irony.

Sideways and upright sad faces

Upright faces show sadness with the eyes; T T stands for streaming tears. Park found that :( and T T carried the same meaning, and that between 2008 and 2010 :( grew more common on Twitter in both Japan and the US while T T declined, which they read as :( becoming the more usual way of showing sadness worldwide.

The typed face and the picture

Unicode has a frowning face as a single character, U+2639 WHITE FROWNING FACE ☹, and an emoji, U+1F641 SLIGHTLY FROWNING FACE 🙁; each chart cross-refers to the other.