Resources like offer over 10,000 icons for customers to use by purchasing a license. We’ll never know if it was a typo or a genuine attempt at documenting humor, but it sure is amusing to think of early typists getting resourceful when transcribing his speech.Įven if your heart is after a specific emoji, not all hope is lost. Though Fahlman is generally credited as being the first to use emoticons in written text, there is some debate as to whether a transcript of an 1862 speech by Abraham Lincoln contained a winking face. He sent an email to a message board that included the very first text-based smiley face that read, “I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: 🙂 Read it sideways.” Within only a few months, the trend caught on across the globe and soon enough, typists of all ages were incorporating smiley faces into their messages. It led to jokes being misunderstood, sarcasm going undetected, and general blandness when communicating online.
The emoticon was born in 1982 when Professor Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon University was frustrated there wasn’t a way to associate any emotion behind electronic correspondence.
