An emoticon (, ə-MOH-tə-kon, rarely , ih-MOTT-ih-kon), 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.

The first ASCII emoticons are generally credited to computer scientist Scott Fahlman, who proposed what came to be known as "smileys" – :-) and :-( – in a message on the bulletin board system (BBS) of Carnegie Mellon University in 1982.

In Western countries, emoticons are usually written at a right angle to the direction of the text. Users from Japan popularized a kind of emoticon called kaomoji, utilizing the larger character sets required for Japanese, that can be understood without tilting one's head to the left. This style arose on ASCII NET of Japan in 1986.As SMS mobile text messaging and the Internet became widespread in the late 1990s, emoticons became increasingly popular and were commonly used in texting, Internet forums, and e-mails. Emoticons have played a significant role in communication through technology, and some devices and applications have provided stylized pictures that do not use text punctuation. They offer another range of "tone" and feeling through texting that portrays specific emotions through facial gestures while in the midst of text-based cyber communication. Emoticons were the precursors to modern emojis, which have been in a state of continuous development for a variety of digital platforms. Today, over 90% of the world's online population uses emojis or emoticons.