History of the Smiley Face

A smiley face is a representation of a smiling face and is either denoted by a colon and parenthesis, such as :) . Smiley faces that are not typed consist of a circle with two points for eyes and a semicircle that represents a smiling mouth.

One of the earliest known instances of a smiley face was in a March 10th, 1953 New York Herald Tribune advertisement that promoted the film, ‘Lili’, which starred Leslie Caron. As the film opened nationwide, it is believed that this ad ran in many newspapers around the country.

The smiley face as seen on yellow buttons with two dots for eyes and a smile was invented in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1963 by Harvey Ball. This yellow smiley face was created by Mr. Ball for a Worcester, Massachusetts insurance firm State Mutual Life Assurance. The smiley face became part of the public domain before attempts by the firm to trademark the image could be realized.

The smiley face graphic was popularized in the early part of the 1970s by two brothers, Bernard and Murray Spain. The Spain brothers seized upon the smiley face graphic in a general novelty selling campaign. Soon the brothers were producing smiley face t-shirts, coffee mugs and even smiley face bumper stickers.

Along with the smiley face image, many of these products carried the tagline ‘Have a happy day’. The ‘Have a happy day’ motto was devised by Murray Spain. There were an estimated fifty million smiley face buttons spread throughout the United States by 1972, at which point the smiley face button fad began to fade.

The smiley face was also one of the primary symbols adopted by the subculture of acid house dance music enjoyers. The acid house dance music scene was big in the late 1980s, especially in the United Kingdom. Here, the smiley face image was particularly associated in the acid house dance culture with the drug Ecstasy.

The smiley face has also been adapted to show sadness as well as many other types of emotion. In this way, ‘smiley faces’ are called ‘emoticons’, as they are employed to express even complex emotion that would take many words to express with plain text. This type of usage is known as a paralanguage.

The creator of the first ASCII smiley faces used to express emotion was Scott Fahlman. Mr. Fahlman suggested on Carnegie Mellon University general bulletin board that the colon and parenthesis characters should be used to denote certain emotions.

More recently, text smiley faces used in online forums or email are automatically converted to graphical smiley face representations. Instant messaging software is another example of applications that replace textual smiley faces with graphical versions.

Originally smiley faces were quite simple and meant to replace only the most common emotions, such as happy and sad. In fact, the libraries of smiley faces that are available sometimes make it necessary for the related applications to open up an array of available smiley faces to choose from. Currently, there are smiley faces for a variety of unique emotions as well as activities and objects.

The goal of smiley faces and emoticons is to eliminate misunderstandings. When we hear people speak much of the context is delivered via one of voice or punctuation and enunciation. With smiley faces users can punctuate certain sentences that may be ambiguous otherwise.

Aura Mirchandani is the Editor and Publisher of Article Click. For more FREE articles for your ezine and websites visit ArticleClick.com. Article Click is a free content article directory.