Emoticons are textual portrayals of a writer’s moods or facial expressions in the form of icons. Initially, these icons consisted of ASCII art. Later it became Shift JIS art and Unicode art. In recent times, static and animated graphical icons have joined the traditional text-based emoticons, commonly known as emojis.
There are generally three types of emoticons:
- Western (mainly from America and Europe) or horizontal (though not all are in that orientation)
- Eastern or vertical (mainly from east Asia)
- 2channel style (originally used on 2channel and other Japanese message boards)
The most common explanation for these different styles is that in the East, the eyes play the primary role in facial expressions, while in the West, the whole face tends to be used.
