Emoticon celebrating its 25th

PITTSBURGH - It was a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon.

:-)

Twenty-five years ago, three keystrokes - a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis - were first used as a horizontal "smiley face" in a computer message by Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman, the university said.

To mark the anniversary tomorrow, Fahlman and his colleagues are starting an annual student contest for innovation in technology-assisted, person-to-person communication. The Smiley Award, sponsored by Yahoo Inc., carries a $500 cash prize.

Language experts say the smiley face and other so-called emoticons, or emotional icons, have given people a concise way of expressing sentiments in e-mail and other electronic messages that otherwise would be difficult to detect.

Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly.

"I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)," wrote Fahlman. "Read it sideways."

Carnegie Mellon said the smileys spread from its campus to other universities, businesses, and eventually around the world as the Internet gained popularity. Variations, such as the "wink" that uses a semicolon, emerged later.

The emotion behind a written sentence may be hard to discern because it is something often conveyed through tone of voice, said Clifford Nass, a professor of communications at Stanford University.

"What emoticons do is essentially provide a mechanism to transmit emotion when you don't have the voice," Nass said.

Carnegie Mellon says Fahlman is the originator of the smiley face emoticon, though computer science and linguistics professors contacted by the Associated Press said they were unaware of who created the symbol.