An Emoticon (or Smiley) is a sequence of ordinary characters you can find on your computer keyboard.

Emoticons are used in e-mail, chat, SMS and other forms of communication using computers. The most popular emoticons are the smiling faces (smileys or smilies) that people use to say "don't take what I just wrote too seriously". If you don't see that it represents a smiling face, tip your head to the left and look at it again. The colon represents the eyes, the dash represents the nose, and the right parenthesis represent the mouth. Many people use MSN and Yahoo, for this reason I added a list with MSN and Yahoo emoticons. When using these during your chat session, they will be converted to real icons.

The most commonly-used symbols are :-) [smile, happy] and :-( [sad, unhappy].