What Does Emoticon Mean?
An emoticon is some representation of an emotion using digital icons. The first emoticons were made of ASCII text characters. Newer emoticons as used on popular modern messaging platforms are engineered and graphically designed icons rather than collections of text characters.
Techopedia Explains Emoticon
The use of emoticons goes all the way back to the 1800s, where people began to use numbers as shorthand for various types of emotions in Morse code. The use of the letters “x” and “o” to represent hugs and kisses in the print era is also an example of the origin from which emoticons sprung.
