ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters. The term is also loosely used to refer to text-based visual art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages. Most examples of ASCII art require a fixed-width font such as Courier for presentation.
An emoticon, short for emotion icon, is a pictorial representation of a facial expression using characters—usually punctuation marks, numbers and letters—to express a person's feelings, mood or reaction, without needing to describe it in detail.
A smiley, sometimes called a smiley face, is a basic ideogram representing a smiling face. Since the 1950s, it has become part of popular culture worldwide, used either as a standalone ideogram or as a form of communication, such as emoticons. The smiley began as two dots and a line representing eyes and a mouth. More elaborate designs in the 1950s emerged, with noses, eyebrows, and outlines. New York radio station WMCA used a yellow and black design for its "Good Guys" campaign in the early 1960s. More yellow-and-black designs appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, including works by Harvey Ross Ball in 1963, and Franklin Loufrani in 1971. Today, The Smiley Company founded by Franklin Loufrani claims to hold the rights to the smiley face in over 100 countries. It has become one of the top 100 licensing companies globally.
LOL, or lol, is an initialism for laughing out loud, and a popular element of Internet slang, which can be used to indicate amusement, irony, or double meanings. It was first used almost exclusively on Usenet, but has since become widespread in other forms of computer-mediated communication and even face-to-face communication. It is one of many initialisms for expressing bodily reactions, in particular laughter, as text, including initialisms for more emphatic expressions of laughter such as LMAO and ROFL or ROTFL.
An emoji is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram, or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversation as well as to replace words as part of a logographic system. Emoji exist in various genres, including facial expressions, expressions, activity, food and drinks, celebrations, flags, objects, symbols, places, types of weather, animals, and nature.
Miscellaneous Symbols is a Unicode block (U+2600–U+26FF) containing glyphs representing concepts from a variety of categories: astrological, astronomical, chess, dice, musical notation, political symbols, recycling, religious symbols, trigrams, warning signs, and weather, among others.
A thumb signal, usually described as a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, is a common hand gesture achieved by a closed fist held with the thumb extended upward or downward, respectively. The thumbs-up gesture is associated with positivity, approval, achievement, satisfaction and solidarity, while the thumbs-down gesture is associated with concern, disapproval, dissatisfaction, rejection and failure.
Irony punctuation is any form of notation proposed or used to denote irony or sarcasm in written text. Written text, in English and other languages, lacks a standard way to mark irony, and several forms of punctuation have been proposed to fill the gap. The oldest is the percontation point in the form of a reversed question mark, proposed by English printer Henry Denham in the 1580s for marking rhetorical questions, which can be a form of irony. Specific irony marks have also been proposed, such as in the form of an open upward arrow, used by Marcellin Jobard in the 19th century, and in a form resembling a reversed question mark, proposed by French poet Alcanter de Brahm during the 19th century.
Tsu is one of the Japanese kana, each of which represents one mora. Both are phonemically, reflected in the Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki Romanization tu, although for phonological reasons, the actual pronunciation is, reflected in the Hepburn romanization tsu.
Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs is a Unicode block containing meteorological and astronomical symbols, emoji characters largely for compatibility with Japanese telephone carriers' implementations of Shift JIS, and characters originally from the Wingdings and Webdings fonts found in Microsoft Windows.
Pile of Poo (💩), also known informally as the poomoji (slang), poop emoji, or poo emoji, is an emoji resembling a coiled pile of feces, usually adorned with cartoon eyes and a large smile. Originating from Japan, it is used as an expression in various contexts. Some possible uses include: as a response of passive aggressive emotion; for comedic value; as commentary on what's bad; or as its literal meaning. The emoji is in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs Unicode block: U+1F4A9💩PILE OF POO.
Apple Color Emoji is a color typeface used on Apple platforms such as iOS and macOS to display Emoji characters.
Emoticons is a Unicode block containing emoticons or emoji. Most of them are intended as representations of faces, although some of them include hand gestures or non-human characters.
Kaomoji was invented in the 1980s as a way of portraying facial expressions using text characters in Japan. It was independent of the emoticon movement started by Scott Fahlman in the United States in the same decade. Kaomojis are most commonly used as emoticons or emojis in Japan.
An emoji domain is a domain name with one or more emoji in it, for example 😉.tld.
Animoji are a set of digital avatars created by Apple Inc., based upon symbols of animals and mythical creatures from their Apple Color Emoji typeface. Unlike standard emoji, Animoji are 3D models which can be custom-animated using facial motion capture to reflect the user's own facial expressions and utilize lip sync to appear to speak audio messages recorded by the sender. The name is a portmanteau of "animated emoji", referring to this ability. Certain Animoji also use audio modulation features to change how the voice of the character sounds when recorded.
uwu, also stylized UwU, is an emoticon representing a cute face. The u characters represent closed eyes, while the w represents a cat mouth. It is used to express various warm, happy, or affectionate feelings.
The Heart Eyes (😍) emoji is an ideogram that is used in communication to express happiness towards something. The Unicode Consortium listed it as the third most used emoji in 2019.
Slang used or popularized by Generation Z differs from slang of earlier generations; ease of communication via Internet social media has facilitated its rapid proliferation, creating "an unprecedented variety of linguistic variation".
The Person with Headscarf emoji (🧕) is included in Unicode 10.0 and the Emoji 5.0 depicting a person wearing a headscarf wrapped around the top of their head and underneath their chin which is typically used to convey a woman wearing a hijab. The creation of the emoji was petitioned by Rayouf Alhumedhi, designed by Alephandra Messer, and approved by the Unicode Consortium in 2016.
