An emoticon is a typographic display of a facial expression, used to convey emotion in a text-only medium. For a long time, apart from :) and :( most people couldn't decipher them, despite being reinvented multiple times over human history.
So in 1997 we started playing around with Smiley, creating animated faces that corresponded to the emoticons made from plain punctuation marks, trying to make sense of them, whilst enhancing them for a new digital age. From these Smileys a generation of emoji descendants were born.
Browse our Smiley dictionary and discover the perfect emoticon to express yourself.
