EMOTICON

views updated

EMOTICON. [A blend of emotion and icon]. In COMPUTING, a small composite symbol, not unlike an ICON, formed from punctuation symbols and used by the sender of an E-MAIL message to indicate mood and attitude. The best-known emoticon is the smiley :-), indicating that whatever has been typed is a joke or well intended; others are :-( for ‘sad’ and ;-) for ‘winking’. The term smiley is often used for all emoticons, even if they are not at all like smiling.

More From encyclopedia.com