emoticons

Noun

emoticon (plural emoticons)

1. A graphic made up of text characters to represent such emotion; a smiley.
   • A remark intended humorously is often indicated by the letter G in parentheses, for "grin," or by a sideways happy face built from punctuation marks. Such symbols are known as emoticons.[1992 December 1, William Grimes, “Computer as a Cultural Tool: Chatter Mounts on Every Topic”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 23 Jul 2021, page C13
2. An image or graphic icon used to represent such emotions; an emoji.
   • In addition to placing emoticons by clicking icons in the pop-up panel shown in Figure 4-2, you can enter the text representation in your text chat window. For example, to show the image of the emoticon with sunglasses, you enter (cool).2007, Loren Abdulezer, Susan Abdulezer, Howard Dammond, Skype for Dummies, →ISBN, page 61