S what does this emoticon mean

Natural Language Processing. Techopedia Terms. Connect with us. Sign up. Term of the Day. Best of Techopedia weekly. News and Special Offers occasional. Techopedia Explains Emoticon. What Does Emoticon Mean? Techopedia Explains Emoticon The use of emoticons goes all the way back to the s, where people began to use numbers as shorthand for various types of emotions in Morse code.

Last modified on Skip to: content search login. Knowledge Base Toggle local menu Menus About the team. Knowledge Base Search. Log in. And so it feeds back to speech as something more complicated than what it first was. So too with. True, doesn't use actual letters. And true, we don't pronounce. But we do gesture it. And we can play around with it and use it as different kinds of words.

Here are some kinds of words can be:. Interjection: This is how we usually use it: Like tsk, huh, haha, and so on, it can be an expression all on its own — filling the same kind of slot as a whole sentence, but without noun or verb, just to express an attitude. Why write I am in tears laughing which uses 21 of the characters Twitter gives you when you can just put? For emphasis you can use more than one — just like tsk tsk tsk or hahaha. Sentence adverb: We could say that emoticons and emoji serve as sentence adverbs, conveying an attitude to the utterance as a whole, like frankly in Frankly, I don't care.

But we normally put them at the end of a sentence — I don't care :P — which is an optional but less common placement for sentence adverbs, and we'd use a comma in I don't care, frankly but probably not in I don't care, :P. We can put them at the start of a sentence — That's ridiculous! It suggests we're really treating them as separate expressions, like Hahaha! That's ridiculous! We also don't seem to use them much as other kinds of adverbs: He ran down the street or That's crazy!

Adjective: We can use them like What's up with the face? We may be more likely to use them predicatively: I'm feeling really about that.

Noun: We can write I got a lot of out of that. But we probably won't pluralize it: no How many s did you get out of that? Verb: There's no big problem with If he does that I am going to. But we can't easily conjugate it. It likely looks wrong to put He really a lot or Yesterday he all evening.