Smiling face Emoji

Smileys

A classic, hand-drawn style circular face featuring a simple curved smile and two dots for eyes. Unlike the modern, colorful versions of this face, this iteration maintains the flat, monochrome look of early digital typography.

Usage Context

Used to convey friendliness, happiness, or a non-threatening tone in casual text conversations. It acts as the grandfather to more expressive icons like 😊 or 😄 and is often used to soften the blow of a direct message or show general contentment.

History

This white smiling face on a black background is a legacy character derived from the original DEC VT100 character set and early PC code pages like CP437. It was an essential piece of early computing, allowing users to inject a bit of human emotion into otherwise cold, text-only terminal interfaces.

Details

Glyph

☺

Unicode

U+263A

Shortcode

:emoji_u263a:

HTML Entity

☺

Specifications

Vendor Google

Category Smileys

Subcategory face-affection

Unicode Version 6.0

Emoji Version 1.0

License CC-BY 4.0

Google Noto License

Emoji graphics by Twitter/X, licensed under CC-BY 4.0

Noto Color Emoji graphics are copyrighted by Google Inc. and licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Font files may also be subject to the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.

Apache 2.0 SIL OFL 1.1 Noto Repository