Emoticons (顔文字, kaomoji) are faces created by combining symbols and letters. They became widespread with the spread of the Internet.
Most are expressed in a single line, and are often used at the end of a sentence to express emotions.
In Japan, it is used in the form facing the reader like "(・ω・)", but in Europe and the United States, it is used with a 90-degree tilt, such as ":)". This articles will explain more about Japanese emoticons, know as kaomoji.
Wikipedia also distinguishes between "net community style" and "2ch style". One-byte alphanumeric characters such as "(ToT)" is for the "net community style".
The "2ch style" is used to distinguish those that make heavy use of Greek, Cyrillic, mathematical symbols, and other machine-dependent characters such as "(´；ω；｀)", but in fact, these were around before 2ch.
Since the popularization of Unicode, emoticons using foreign characters have also appeared, making them even more complex.
Some emojis, such as "(笑)" (lol, laughing), although this is not an emoticon, are used as an insult (the original usage has been reversed), some may be interpreted as such, and many people simply dislike them, so care must be taken not to abuse them.
It is said that one can tell the generation by the usage of pictograms.
