Il compleanno di Smiley

In computer technology the first use of a classic smile dates back to 1982. Scott Falman, an American IT-professor, suggested using :-) to mark those announcements on campus that contained humor. It happened on September 19, which is now an official Smiley's Birthday.

The tradition of illustrating emotions by symbol combinations forming a human face continued to develop. Complicated drawings demanded something more than just punctuation marks. The new components included Latin letters, geometric forms, diacritical marks, and even alphabets like Hindu Kannada and Japanese Katakana. Follow the links to check them out.

As cyber technology developed, smiles evolved in emojis — small pictograms that you paste in a text by a special command. Smiley faces appeared in Unicode too. To type ☺ on a keyboard, use the combination Alt+1 (you should type 1 on number panel).

To celebrate Smiley's Birthday, copy and paste the symbols and emojis from here in your texts and social media posts. I know, this holiday is not very popular, but we've gotta celebrate somehow! Getting wasted is off the table 😈