Information On Smileys and Emoticons

A smiley or emoticon is a collection of symbols and characters on your computer's keyboard. If you can't see the one you are looking for, try shifting your head to the left -- the colon is used for the eyes, the dash makes up the nose and the right parenthesis creates the mouth. Smileys usually come right after the punctuation (or in stead of the punctuation) at the end of a sentence. A smiley communicates to someone the emotion you really mean to convey after you make an offhand remark. They are also called emoticons because they intend to convey emotion!

An entire new world of smileys has come to be and NetLingo is fast trying to track them down. We consider these "straight-on smileys" as another form of ASCII ART: those in which you do not tilt your head but rather look at it straight on, such as @(*0*)@ for a koala. A new section is coming soon!

And, lest you think that's all, there are also now assicons and boobiecons... emoticons which highlight other parts of the body! Here is our ever-growing list of smileys...enjoy!