The emoticon, punctuation to depict a facial expression, began 30 years ago this week. Using three keystrokes, the colon, dash and parenthesis, to suggest a smile may not be a great scientific ...

Thirty-three years ago today, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University invented the emoticon. Scott E. Fahlman, along with other members of CMU's computer science community, used online "bulletin ...

The emoticon is old. Or, young, 30 years young! Either way, it's a bona fide grown-up symbol now, with the life experience under its lack of a belt (for it has no waist) to prove it. But it has ...

Today, we know them as emojis, but 40 years ago, the first emoticon was born with just a few keystrokes. The opportunities were endless as the early Internet stepped into its new role as a digital ...

But the first emoticon – specifically the smiley face – could have been used much earlier. Literary critic Levi Stahl came across a poem written in 1648 which includes what could be the first ...

A dedicated poetry reader appears to have discovered a smiley face in a poem from 1648, a find that would extend the pre-history of the emoticon back by about 200 years. Editor Levi Stahl ...

We're all familiar with the smiley emoticon, and its power to add levity, flirtation, and occasionally passive-aggression to our texts, chats, and e-mails. But according to researchers ...

The emoticon became controversial when a Tumblr user in 2013 said that predators might use “uwu” and similar “cute” internet lingo to get closer to teenage girls. This discourse around the ...

At some point, you've probably seen the infamous shrug emoticon: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Emoticons (not to be confused with emoji) are a series of characters put together to make a face, animal or some ...