Smileys vs emoticons?
What’s the difference? The word ’emoticon’ is a combination of the words ’emotion’ and ‘icon’ and is exactly that – an icon used to express msn emotions. The ‘smiley’ or the ‘smiley face’ is a stylized representation of a smiling human face with the most simple smiley being a yellow circle with two small dots representing eyes. That’s the theory. In reality as we look around websites similar to ours we see the words used interchangeably to mean the same thing e.g. some say free emoticons, some say free smileys but they are talking about the same images. It seems that Europeans tend to call them ’emoticons’ and Americans tend to refer to them as ‘smileys’ and when you get to Asia, it’s different again. Confused? We try to be consistent but do use ‘smiley’ to refer to a yellow smiley face. Messenger users often call them ‘msn smileys’ or ‘yahoo smileys’. There are heaps of sites that give away free smileys – Smiley Central smileys are the most popular. Pay attention, some people write th
