Scott Fahlman, programmer and retired professor at Carnegie Mellon University, was the first documented person to use the emoticons :-) and :-(when proposing the sequence of characters to mark ...

But they don't teach emoticons in school, and some of them are actually hard to understand — at least for some of us. Below we've listed the actual definitions for all the main emoticons.

Work emails are a tricky business. If your office is very formal, maintaining a serious, personality-free tone in messages to colleagues can be difficult (particularly if you usually communicate ...