Definitions for "Smilies"
Keyboard symbols used to convey emotion in electronic communication such as e-mail. These little pictures are especially useful to flag humorous or ironic passages that might otherwise be ambiguous, thus avoiding angry or hurt reactions in readers who lack tone-of-voice cues from the sender. The most common version, :-), looks like a smiling face when you turn your head sideways to the left. Many variations are employed to express a wide range of moods: :-( sadness, disappointment ;-) knowing wink :-o oh, no! and so on.
emoticons like :) will translate to smiley faces in the chat software and some sites provide exotic smilies like a little vomiting face or a skull or almost anything you can imagine. Be warned, if you import these when Zette is around you may see a large one where a smiley face is Splatted.... ( In fact, Zette published a story featuring smilies.)
symbolic facial expressions produced from the ASCII character set (usually punctuation marks). The basic ‘smiley’ is :-). See for some alternatives.