emoticon

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emoticon (contraction of emotion + icon) A combination of punctuation marks, and sometimes other characters, first used in electronic mail and intended to convey the mood of the writer; emoticons are also called smileys, regardless of mood. E-mail messages are largely restricted to the ASCII character set, which precludes the use of text attributes such as bold, italic, or underline but does have a full set of punctuation marks. These are typically used to make faces sideways on the line (see table).

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