When was the first emoticon used in an email message

The latter is like a friendly slap on the back maybe. Emoticons signal how the author of a message wants us to respond. Professor Scott Fahlman, of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, sent an email to a computer bulletin board at am on 19 September , a Sunday:. Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use. While the good professor did not save his message, and efforts to recover the message from the university computer files failed, someone at Microsoft did manage to retrieve this important historical email message.

Skepta became a famous British rapper, Walker a famous squash player. With all due respect, the yellow smiley emoticons and graphic image emoticons called emojis are not real emoticons. You only have to know the magic keystrokes to invoke the graphic. Real emoticons are made with a keyboard, fingers, and a vivid imagination. Okay a search engine also is allowed.

Here are a few clever examples I found online:. For everyone else, it means you're done reading this article. You're free to click links below if you want to learn more about emoticons and happily waste more time. Or subscribe to this magazine if you have not already and support great writing for only a dollar a month. Includes an audio interview with Professor Fahlman. The controversy in all its gory detail.

Now emoji were officially on their way to becoming a language. Emoji have been available outside of Japan since the mids through separate apps, which let users copy and paste the icons into text messages and emails. In , Apple added an official emoji keyboard to iOS; Android followed suit two years later. As emoji became more popular, they also became more plentiful. The Unicode Consortium added new emoji to its approved list each year, gathered from users around the world: the first emoji bride, dozens of plants and animals, types of food, and depictions of all kinds of activities.

Unicode requires a lengthy submission and approval process for every new batch hoping for christening, and it can take up to two years for an emoji to travel from first draft to your phone.

First, new emoji are suggested through a formal proposal to the Unicode Consortium. These detailed proposals include an explanation of why the emoji should be adopted and ideas for how it might look. Refried beans? Lima beans? Green beans? Should they be in a can?

In a bowl? Growing out of the ground? When the subcomittee comes to a consensus, a new emoji can be born. As the emoji vocabulary began to grow, some people wondered why certain images were privileged over others. What was sarcastic? Nobody was really sure. Scott was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and in the midst of a discussion on how to fix the dilemma, Scott inadvertently created a phenomenon: the first emoticon , a sort of sideways smiley face with two eyes and a nose.

He also turned that smile upside down for a sad face, to express displeasure, frustration, or anger. The historic day was September 19, The unique character sequences caught on quickly at Carnegie Mellon and proceeded to infiltrate computer network message boards at other universities and research labs around the world. The open-mouthed, surprised smiley was one.

A smiley wearing glasses was yet another. Then things got really creative when people with apparently too much time on their hands created emoticons that looked like Abraham Lincoln and Santa Claus. Of course, there are those who argue that these so-called emoticons were used far before Scott created them in Professor Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, used the first digital emoticon on the morning of the of September 19th, And it was a smiley face Fahlman posted it on a Carnegie Mellon computer bulletin board and he added a note that suggested students use the emoticon to indicate which of their posts were intended as jokes or were not serious.

Below is a copy of the original posting [slightly edited] on the Carnegie Mellon bulletin board source:. On his website, Scott Fahlman describes his motivation for the creation of the first emoticon:.

Today, many applications will include a menu of emoticons that can be automatically inserted. However, some applications do not have this feature. So here are a few of the common emoticons and the keyboard strokes for making them.

The ones below should work with Facebook and Facebook Messenger. Both applications offer an emoticon menu. Emoticon and Emoji are almost the same. Emoji is a Japanese word that translates in English as "e" for "picture" and "moji" for "character. They were provided by Japanese mobile companies as a bonus for their customers. You do not have to use several keyboard strokes to make an emoji since a standardized set of emoji is provided as a menu choice.

According to the Lure of Language blog:.