The term emoticon refers to a series of text characters (typically punctuation or symbols) that is meant to represent a facial expression or gesture (sometimes

The term emoticon refers to a series of text characters (typically punctuation or symbols) that is meant to represent a facial expression or gesture (sometimes when viewed sideways), such as ;-). Emoticons predate Unicode and emoji, but were later adapted to include Unicode characters. http://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Emoticons http://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Emoticons