Wink ;-)

How to read it

Encyclopaedia Britannica lists ;) as conveying humour and cheekiness, with ;-) as a variation, and says it can signal humour or more risqué themes. Dictionary.com, writing about the winking face emoji, says it is often used to flirt, but also to joke playfully, to let the reader in on a secret, or to hint at irony or a hidden meaning, and it calls the typed wink the emoji’s predecessor. Scott Fahlman, who proposed the Smiley :-) in 1982, writes that only his two original faces, the “winky” ;-) and the versions without a nose “seem to be in common use for actual communication.”

Also searched as: ;), ;-), what does ;) mean, wink emoticon, winking face emoticon.

How common it is

In Tyler Schnoebelen’s sample of American English tweets from 2011, ;) was the second commonest emoticon after :), in 10.5% of the tweets carrying one of the 28 commonest; ;-) with a nose was in 1.9%. People who used the smiley a lot used the wink too: 3,739 users with ten or more :)’s also had ten or more ;)’s, where about 1,505 would be expected by chance. Jaram Park and colleagues, studying tweets worldwide, found that variants such as the wink can carry a different feeling from the plain :) they are built on.

Read as smug

Not everyone takes it kindly. Britannica notes that many people take offence at the wink emoticon and its emoji, reading it as condescending or smug.

The typed face and the emoji

The emoji is U+1F609 WINKING FACE 😉. Dictionary.com says the typed ;) is still used by people who prefer emoticons to emoji, and on platforms where emoji are hard to type.

Look-alikes

The smiley :-) has a colon for its eyes where the wink has a semicolon; at small sizes the comma under the dot is the only difference.