An emotion is defined as a textual expression representing the face of a writer’s disposition or facial expression. Animated emoticons are frequently used to alert a responder to the tone of a statement, and can transform and improve interpretation of plain text. They are short sequence of keyboard alphabets and symbols that indicates a facial expression or emotion. Emoticons are also oftenly called a “smiley. These emoticons are usually used to convey lightheartedness, happiness, facetiousness, joking, anger, frustration, and many more emotions.

Emoticons play a critical part in Internet communication because a massive majority of people communicating have never met and do not know each other well, if at all. Misinterpretation of intentions is all too easy, minus the facial expressions and verbal inflections that face-to-face communication affords. With the popularity of the smiley emoticon other emoticons quickly followed. Sometimes an emoticon will become popular in a particular newsgroup or Web group, but will not be known outside that group. Other emoticons have become part of the international language of the Internet. Research shows that the application of emoticons may have developed in the nineteenth century were they were commonly used in casual or comical writing. Digital forms of emoticons on the Internet were said to be conceived in September1982.

There are thousands of free animated emoticons available on the Internet. The word ‘emoticon’ is a combination of the words ‘emotion’ and ‘icon’ which is literally what it is, an icon used to articulate emotions. In web forums, instant messengers and online games, and to some degree Microsoft Word, text emoticons are usually automatically substituted with small related images, which came to be called “Emoticons” as well. initially, these image emoticons were fairly simple and replaced only the most basic and general character series, but over time they became so intricate that the more specialized emoticons are often input using a menu or popup windows, occasionally listing hundreds of items.

Emoticons have also developed beyond simple caricature facial expressions to an array of still or moving images. Were they were initially used as facial expressions; emoticons have now expanded to comprise other expressions such as an “emoticon” showing a guitar as an allusion to music.

Graphical emoticons were developed in 1996. There is extensive use of GIF or PNG graphic files, because of their simplicity and small file size capabilities. a lot of emoticon artists design their emoticons pixel by pixel; the custom msn emoticons feature permits the use of animated msn emoticons up to 50×50 pixels in size. several emoticons are made in vector format, such as SVG, and automatically processed using a graphics library. This allows SVG files to be automatically made as a GIF or PNG file, which is congruent with most browsers, which SVG is not.