Emoticonr.com is your best free resource website for emoticons and smileys. You can search or browse alphabetically and find the meanings of the most popular chat emoticons and smileys. We provide emoticons meaning for the most popular social network or chat application. Here, you can find Google, Facebook or Yahoo emoticons, smileys and animated smiley faces.
Emoticons or "emotional icons" are pictorial representation of a facial expression which in the absence of body language serves to draw a receiver's attention to the tenor or temper of a sender's nominal verbal communication, changing and improving its interpretation.
The first documented person to use the emoticons :-) and :-( with a specific suggestion that they be used to express emotion was Scott Fahlman, student of Carnegie Mellon University, in 1982.
Emoticons in Western style, usually, have the eyes on the left, followed by nose and the mouth. The two character version :) which omits the nose is also very popular. The most basic emoticons are relatively consistent in form, but each of them can be transformed by being rotated, with or a without hyphen (nose).<
Emoticons in Japanese style, can be understood without tilting one's head to the left. These emoticons are usually found in a format similar to (*_*). The asterisks indicate the eyes; the central character, commonly an underscore, the mouth; and the parentheses, the outline of the face.
Unicode emoticons are introduced in Unicode Standard version 6.0 (published in October 2010). It covers unicode range from 1F600 to 1F64F.
Source: www.wikipedia.org