Emoticons Smyles and More (11 Gift Animated)

The National Telegraphic Review and Operators Guide in April 1857 documented the use of the number 73 in Morse code to express “love and kisses” (later reduced to the more formal “best regards”). Dodge’s Manual in 1908 documented the reintroduction of “love and kisses” as the number 88. Gajadhar and Green comment that both Morse code abbreviations are more succinct than modern abbreviations such as LOL.

Typographical emoticons were published in 1881 by the U.S. satirical magazine Puck. In 1912 Ambrose Bierce proposed “an improvement in punctuation — the snigger point, or note of cachinnation: it is written thus \___/! and presents a smiling mouth. It is to be appended, with the full stop, [or exclamation mark as Bierce's later example used] to every jocular or ironical sentence”.

Emoticons had already come into use in sci-fi fandom in the 1940s,[4] although there seems to have been a lapse in cultural continuity between the communities.