List of emoticons

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This is a list of emoticons or textual portrayals of a writer's moods or facial expressions in the form of icons. Originally, these icons consisted of ASCII art, and later, Shift JIS art and Unicode art. In recent times, graphical icons, both static and animated, have joined the traditional text-based emoticons; these are commonly known as emoji.^[1]

Emoticons can generally be divided into three groups: Western (mainly from United States and Europe) or horizontal (though not all are in that orientation); Eastern or vertical (mainly from East Asia); and 2channel style (originally used on 2channel and other Japanese message boards). The most common explanation for these different styles is that in the East, the eyes play the primary role in facial expressions, while in the West, the whole face tends to be used.^[2]