Ubiquitous, possibly annoying :-) first popped up on an online bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982.

Typography continued to evolve as wingdings were developed in 1990, allowing users access to symbols through their keyboard. Pictographic representations of everything from smiley faces to ...

Stansifer said the emoticon was part of a natural progression in communication. "I don't think the smiley face was the beginning and the end," he said.

What is your feeling on using emoticons (smiley faces, etc.) in professional emails? My first reaction is no, they are too childish and unprofessional, but then I find myself sometimes wanting to ...

Pirillo solves the problem on his system by simply telling his Office applications to automatically replace ":)" with a unicode smiley face character—specifically this one: ☺.

PITTSBURGH — Happy birthday to the emoticon -- the sideways smiley-face that changed the way we communicate emotion online. Consisting of three keyboard strokes (colon, hyphen, close parentheses ...

Nor are all smileys created equal. The neural reaction in the study changed significantly depending on whether or not people were looking at the most familiar version of the smiley emoticon. While ...

Here's Microsoft's full explanation: Outlook uses Word as its authoring tool. Previously, we automatically changed “:)” to a smiley face character in the font face WingDings.

The team showed 20 participants images of real faces, smiley face emoticons (involving the use of a colon, hyphen and parenthesis), and a meaningless string of characters.

The emoticon took off all on its own. He never tried to copyright it for financial gain or promote its use, not even after local chain Eat and Park began selling Smiley Face cookies a few years later.

Happy birthday, sideways smiley face! Wednesday marks the 30th birthday of the emoticon. The computer symbol for “not serious” or now more generally “happiness,” made up of a colon, dash ...