:-)

Emoticons are ubiquitous. Which is impressive, considering hardly any of us had even heard of the word just ten years ago. But where did emoticons come from?

Some suggest that the first recorded instance of an emoticon is in the transcript of a speech given by Abraham Lincoln, published in 1862, wherein a semicolon and parenthesis in sequence wink at the reader from the printed page.

But in more modern history, the combination of colon, hyphen, and parenthesis to convey emotion when read sideways was first proposed in an 1982 memo by Scott E. Falman, then a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. He proposed smiley faces and frowny faces to mark jokes and not-jokes.