Emoticons or smileys - An Emoticon (or Smiley) is a sequence of ordinary characters you can find on your computer keyboard. Emoticons are used in e-mail, chat, SMS and other forms of communication using computers. The most popular emoticons are the smiling faces (smileys or smilies) that people use to say 'don't take what I just wrote too seriously'. If you don't see that it represents a smiling face, tip your head to the left and look at it again. The colon represents the eyes, the dash represents the nose, and the right parenthesis represent the mouth.