A smiley is a sequence of characters on your computer keyboard. If you don't see it, try tilting your head to the left -- the colon is the eyes, the dash represents the nose and the right parenthesis is the mouth. Smileys usually follow after the punctuation, or in place of the punctuation, at the end of a sentence ;-) A smiley tells someone what you really mean when you make an offhand remark. They're also called emoticons because they are "icons" which convey "emotion."

New generations of smileys continue to appear on the scene and NetLingo keeps tracking them down. The so-called "modern smileys" (which look like graphical smileys) are known as emojis. There are also straight-on smileys which are considered another form of ASCII ART because you do not tilt your head but rather look at it straight on, such as @(*0*)@ for a Koala and {=^;^=} for a cat. 

See more at: http://www.netlingo.com/smileys.php#sthash.qNv13peV.dpuf

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