Emoticons are textual portrayals of a writer’s expression or mood in the form of icons. You may notice that there are some static or some animated graphic icons smiling, laughing, crying at you. Wondered how can you create such icons to express your feelings to others. An emoticon is a typographic display of our facial expression to convey the feeling to others through texts.
Difference between Emoji and Emoticons
Emoticons are letters, punctuation marks and numbers to create pictorial icons to display emotion. The emoticons came from Carnegie Mellon University in 1982. You may notice some icons like the smiling face :-), laughing :-D, very happy :-)), or wink 😉 in some messages. Emoji (in Japanese e for ‘picture’ and moji for ‘character’) are photographs of faces, objects, and symbols. Emoji was invented in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita- a Japanese artist. If a character icon with character and symbols using your keyboard it is an emoticon. If it is like a cartoon-like picture is an Emoji. Emoji are actual pictures of everything where emoticons are a representation of feelings through an extension to the character used.
| Emoji | Emoticon | Usage | Meaning |
 | =-D | Equal, minus, capital D | Laughing out Loud |
| >_< | greater than, underscore, less than | Angry |
| | (-_-) | open paratheses, minus, underscore, minus, close paratheses | Bored |
| (*_*) | open paratheses, asterisk, underscore, asterisk, close paratheses | In Love |
| >_<* | greater than, underscore, less than, asterisk | Annoyed |
You can find smileys and people emojis on Facebook and Whatsapp. WhatsApp uses its own emoji that are displayed on all WhatsApp for Android and WhatsApp Web, you can find it from emojipedia.
