Emoticons are pretty important:
Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker says they’re an extremely useful linguistic evolution.
The Oxford English Dictionary named “crying face” the word of the year.
Humans collectively send 6 billion emoticons every day.
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.
![Here’s what every emoticon really means 2 discoverstoryscape.com Here’s what every emoticon really means](http://discoverstoryscape.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/F978D444-4DFC-4306-947A-F7A030D29EC8-scaled.webp)