Pham Dinh Vien

Discussing MSN emoticons should probably start with understanding what emoticons or smileys are. An emoticon, or smiley, is actually a sequence of ordinary characters existing on each computer keyboard. They are used in different forms of communication involving the computer, such as: e-mail, SMS, chat or others. Among the most popular smiling symbols represent the first MSN emoticons introduced, that are common to other web services. The smiling faces represent a substitute for the face to face casual encouraging smile, but depending on the context other meanings can be conveyed.

Since many people tend to use these signs while communicating via the Internet, MSN, Yahoo, and Google, too, provide you with lists of emoticons, which are converted to real icons while used during a chat session. These emoticons graphically express an emotion through an icon. Hence the name emoticon. Hundreds of these emoticons are being used, whether they are MSN emoticons or other emoticons. The idea of using these symbols is to emphasize the writer’s feelings, emotions and, also, to do it in a funny way.

Is there any difference between smileys and emoticons? The tendency seems to be for the Europeans to use the term emoticons, whereas the Americans tend to call the same things smileys. Anyway, messenger users often call them MSN emoticons, MSN smileys or Yahoo smileys. There are huge numbers of sites that give away free smileys, of which Smiley Central smileys are the most popular.

When considering MSN messenger, MSN emoticons, too, refer to the little smiley face icons. MSN messenger gives its users some free emoticons but it also allows you to use your own custom MSN emoticons. Many of these, which are really great, have been designed for messenger by fans. The custom MSN emoticons feature enables you to use animated emoticons up to 50×50 pixels in size. At My Emoticons icons are divided into romance, girlie, bad boys, moody and other categories. They have even come up with adult emoticons and sex smilies, which, though not for everybody, are still terribly funny.

Each MSN emoticon has a tag, which automatically generates a particular item. The simplest example is a smiley face, which consists of a colon and a right-hand bracket. Thus if you type you will automatically get the smiley-faced emoticon. Using the opposite bracket will give you a sad face. Many other emoticons also have tags that resemble them, and it’s possible to remember the majority of basic emotion tags relatively quickly. For those that are not so easy to remember, there is a drop down menu available in the chat window. Here you can select the emoticon directly by clicking with the mouse.

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