It's rare for Microsoft products to invoke a pleasant sense of nostalgia, but MSN Messenger is a piece of software that does. The instant messaging software has been long dead, with Microsoft ...

Emoji — the pictogram prodigy of text-based emoticons — can be found everywhere. In less than two decades, the ideograms of modern times have become internet shorthand for emotion: They ...

The evolution from the smiley face to emojis took a detour in the 1980s with emoticons, melding “emotion” and “icon” (a word similar to “emoji” conceptually but not etymologically). All emoticons are ...

The four emoticons were published in the American satirical magazine Puck on 30 March 1881. They are described as ‘typographical art’. Scott Fahlman was the first documented person to use ...

Lastly, the new emoji picker in the May 2019 update also includes easy access to special characters, for those times you need the occasional accent, currency symbols, or mathematical constant.

As keyboard-crafted emoticons—and their slicker younger sisters, emoji—have become increasingly central to online speech, the “rampant interplay of words and symbols compounds the complexity ...

Yes, there are hordes of emoji to play with now, especially compared to the old days of MSN Messenger. But let us never forget the emoticons that sadly never made the switch. Here are eight that ...