A symbol added to text to express emotional effect or reaction—for example, sadness, happiness, joking intent, sarcasm, and so forth. Emoticons are often expressed by a conventional kind of "ASCII art," using sequences of punctuation and other symbols to portray likenesses of facial expressions.

In Western contexts these are often turned sideways, as :-) to express a happy face; in East Asian contexts other conventions often portray a facial expression without turning, as ^-^. Rendering systems often recognise conventional emoticon sequences and display them as colourful or even animated glyphs in text. There is also a set of dedicated pictographic symbols—mostly representing different facial expressions—encoded as characters in the Unicode Standard.