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I always used to point out something in the line/sentence above... When did it change to a smile?!

• csande17 5y ago
  Hip youngster here. ^^'s meaning as a smiley face comes from East Asian emoticons (somewhere like Japan or Korea, I'm not sure), where it's pretty much always represented a sort of laughing smiley face like you see in anime-style drawings sometimes -- like a short version of (＠＾◡＾). People also still use it to mean "the thing above this message", though. The easiest way to differentiate it it to use a different number of carets for the "thing above this message" meaning. I like to use one caret for each message, so like if I was referring to the comment directly above mine it'd be ^ and for three messages up it'd be ^^^. You can also use context and position; usually I expect emoticons to appear at the end of a sentence while ^^^ appears at the start.
• Uberphallus 5y ago
  I've always used it as a smile, to point sentences it'd be more like this ^^^^^^^
• genezeta 5y ago
  ^_^ =^.^= -_- -_-' -_-U ^_^u *_* O_o? Ô_ô All of these, and various other combinations, are pretty old -in internet time, I guess-. They are usually known as "upright emoticons" [0], as opposed to "sideways emoticons". ^_^ gets abbreviated to ^^ and that's how you get it to be a smile. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons