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, using Japanese's larger character sets. This style arose on ASCII NET of Japan in 1986. They are also known as verticons (from vertical emoticon) due to their readability without rotations.

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 emails. 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" through texting through facial gestures. Emoticons were the precursors to modern emojis.