Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes — a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis — as a horizontal "smiley ...

Today, everybody knows that combination of a colon, dash and parenthesis is a smiley face. Until 32 years ago this week, that's all it was, a series of nonsensical punctuation. Then, Scott Fahlman, a ...

Happy birthday to the emoticon -- the sideways smiley-face that changed the way we communicate emotion online.Consisting of three keyboard strokes (colon, hyphen, close parentheses), the popular ...

Women are twice as likely as men to use emoticons in text messages, according to a new study from Rice University. The symbols, which began as happy and sad smiling faces but have since morphed into ...

Women might use emoticons more than men, but men have a broader emoticon vocabulary. That’s what researchers from Rice University are saying in a new study that evaluated the use of emoticons in text ...

We often think of emoticons arriving with the invention of text speak - when people first started to send messages using mobile phones and in emails. But the first emoticon – specifically the smiley ...