List of common emoticons

IPA|This is a list of common emoticons.

Western style

Traditionally, the emoticon in Western style is written from left to right, the way one reads and writes in most Western cultures. Thus, most commonly, one will see the eyes on the left, followed by the nose and mouth. To more easily recognise them, the reader should tilt their head toward their left shoulder (or occasionally toward their right shoulder if the "top" of the emoticon is toward the right).

Common examples

Western use of East Asian style

English-language anime forums adopted those emoticons that could be used with the standard ASCII characters available on western keyboards. Because of this, they are often called "anime style" emoticons in the English-speaking Internet. They have since seen use in more mainstream venues, including online gaming, instant-messaging, and other non-anime related forums. Emoticons such as <(^_^)>, which include the parentheses, mouth or nose, and arms (especially those represented by the inequality signs < or >) also are often referred to as "Kirbies" in reference to their likeness to Nintendo's video game character, Kirby. The parentheses are usually dropped when used in the English language context, and the underscore of the mouth may be extended as an intensifier, e.g. ^____^ for very happy.

Around 2007, a new wave of emoticons have appeared such as ( xD}<, :o|<, :D|<, ect.) which use "}" or "|" for arms and "<", ">" or "v" as legs. Currently they are not as popular as most emoticons but due to high use on certain MMORPGs their use may spread in the future.

2channel style

The Japanese language is usually encoded using double-byte character codes. As a result there is a bigger variety of characters that can be used in emoticons, many of which cannot be reproduced in ASCII. Most kaomoji contain Cyrillic and other foreign letters to create even more complicated expressions analogous to ASCII art's level of complexity. To type such emoticons, the input editor that is used to type Japanese on a user's system is equipped with a dictionary of emoticons, after which the user simply types the Japanese word (or something close to it) that represents the desired emoticon to convert the input into such complicated emoticons. Such expressions are known as Shift JIS art.

Users of 2channel in particular have developed a wide variety of unique emoticons using obscure characters. Some have taken on a life of their own and become characters in their own right, like Mona.

=Basic examples=

Emoticons in Unicode

In Unicode, following code points contain emoticons: U+2639(☹), U+263A(☺), U+263B(☻).

ee also

* Emoticon

References

(http://www.cgi3d.com/ascii_art/Emoticon.html)