The Emoticons – Things that are surprisingly older in the internet world

Emoticons? Yes, Emoticons were our favorite ones some time back before the emojis and animations took over it. It is the easiest way to express one's feelings and expressions such as smile, cry, frown and much more.

Especially after social media sites got popular, people started using it often. It required just a combination of few keyboard characters and your emoticon is ready! Some say that emoticon is a combination of word 'emotion' and 'icon'. Like every other thing on the internet, even emoticons have its own unread history. Let us see how this word got evolved and where were they used initially.

If we trace back to its history, we will realize that the emoticons were used in the 17th century. To indicate the satisfaction with the state of his town's municipal financial records in 1635, these emoticons were drawn by a Slovak notary. But it should be noted that before it was commonly used in casual and humorous writing.

If you want to known when this digital forms of emoticons came into existence, then it is in 1982. A proposal by Scott Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a message on 19 September 1982 included this emoticon.

That is, he is the first documented person to make use of emoticons :-) and :-( with a suggestion that they can be used to express emotions. Some sources do say that emoticons took birth in Morse code. People used numbers to express their emotions and expressions to convey it shortly. Later, in 1881, satirical magazine 'Puck' published few typographical emoticons.

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Have you ever wondered who created the smiley face : -). This symbol dates back to 1963, where Harvey Ross Ball, an American graphic artist created this happy face to raise the morale of the employees.

There is another interesting thing to be noted. In 1862, in the original New York Times transcript of a speech by Lincoln, we can see this symbol ;). There was also an argument saying that it must have been a typo, but not a winking face.

As technologies evolved, even the emoticons evolved alongside. Now they have been used as emojis instead of character combinations. One can easily pick one among many emojis which are provided by default in smartphone keyboards to express the feelings.