The :-) emoticon
You might remember it as joke marker, Scott Fahlman smiley
“I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways.”
Viral classics1 of 40
1982·funny
Three characters that solved the oldest problem in text, and are still solving it.
At a glanceThe facts
- Remembered as
- joke marker
- Began as
- A social-media post
- Format
- Post
- Posted by
- Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University
- First posted
- On Carnegie Mellon’s bulletin board, at 11:44 on 19 September 1982
- What it said
- “I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways.”
- Origin
- Not an upload originally
- Available
- Not held by ViralWorld
What this wasThe story
On 19 September 1982, on a Carnegie Mellon bulletin board where people kept mistaking jokes for statements, Scott Fahlman proposed a character sequence for joke markers: :-) — read it sideways. He proposed :-( for the other case. Within months it was on ARPANET and Usenet, and every emoji since is downstream of it.
Why it matteredWhat changed
It solved, in three characters, the problem that text cannot show a joke is a joke. Its first use is recorded to the minute.
TimelineIn order
- Made
The magazine Puck prints faces made of punctuation marks, weeks after a Warsaw newspaper had done the same.1
- Posted
Scott Fahlman proposes :-) as a marker for jokes, and :-( for things that are not, after a joke about a mercury spill in a lift is taken seriously.1
- Remixed
Japanese kaomoji begin to develop separately.1
What people misrememberSet straight
Commonly remembered asNobody had made a face out of punctuation before 1982.
ActuallyNewspapers printed them in 1881. What Fahlman proposed was using one as a signal in online conversation.1
Commonly remembered asAbraham Lincoln used a winking face in 1862.
ActuallyThe mark is in a transcript of one of his speeches, and a linguist who examined it calls it a typesetting error.1
LegacyWhat it left behind
- The original thread was believed lost and was recovered about twenty years later from backup tapes.1
More from hereIn this collection
Why it is here: something the internet still knows by name · a moment that changed what the internet did next · it got out of its own corner of the internet fast · still being watched and quoted years later
This first circulated as a social-media post, not as a video upload.
Where it came fromWhat we know
There is no original upload to identify: this did not begin as one. There is no copy of it here either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is what this page can tell you.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This first circulated as a social-media post, not as a video upload.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
SourcesWhat was read
Sources last read on . That date is about the history on this page. Whether the media still plays is checked separately and can change any day. How ViralWorld documents things