This is a list of emoticons or textual portrayals of a writer's moods or facial expressions in the form of icons. Originally, these icons consisted of ASCII art, and later, Shift JIS art and Unicode art. In recent times, graphical icons, both static and animated, have joined the traditional text-based emoticons; these are commonly known as emoji.^[1]

Some of this article's listed sources may not be reliable. (October 2022)

Emoticons can generally be divided into three groups: Western (mainly from United States and Europe) or horizontal (though not all are in that orientation); Eastern or vertical (mainly from East Asia); and 2channel style (originally used on 2channel and other Japanese message boards). The most common explanation for these different styles is that in the East, the eyes play the primary role in facial expressions, while in the West, the whole face tends to be used.^[2]

Western style emoticons are mostly written from left to right as though the head is rotated counter-clockwise 90 degrees. One will most commonly see the eyes on the left, followed by the nose (often omitted) and then the mouth. Typically, a colon is used for the eyes of a face, unless winking, in which case a semicolon is used. However, an equals sign, a number 8, a capital letter B or a capital letter X are also used to indicate normal eyes, widened eyes, those with glasses or those with crinkled eyes, respectively. Symbols for the mouth vary, e.g. ")" for a smiley face or "(" for a sad face. One can also add a "}" after the mouth character to indicate a beard.^{[citation needed]}

Eastern emoticons generally are not rotated sideways, and may include non-Latin characters to allow for additional complexity. These emoticons first arose in Japan, where they are referred to as kaomoji (literally "face characters"). The base form consists of a sequence of an opening round parenthesis, a character for the left eye, a character for the mouth or nose, a character for the right eye and a closing round parenthesis. The parentheses are often omitted for well-known kaomoji. The mouth/nose part may also be omitted if the eyes are much more important.

Most East Asian characters are usually inscribed in an invisible square with a fixed width. Although there is also a history of half-width characters, many Japanese, Korean and Chinese fonts include full-width forms for the letters of the basic roman alphabet and also include digits and punctuation as found in US ASCII. These fixed-width forms are also available in Unicode. Mostly depending on the input mode available, kaomoji may use these Eastern forms of Western characters, but hardly ever rely on any particular width to be discernible.

This section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. The specific problem is: Notability questionable and reliable sources missing, ideographic spaces and other "fullwidth" characters need to be checked and perhaps be converted to their normal, flexible counterparts. (March 2017)

A number of Eastern emoticons were originally developed on the Japanese discussion site 2channel. Some of these are wider (made up of more characters) than usual kaomoji, or extend over multiple lines of text. Many use characters from other character sets besides Japanese and Latin.

Many emoticons are included as characters in the Unicode standard, in the Miscellaneous Symbols block, the Emoticons block, and the Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs block.