Text and Words

Word Emoticons

When support for custom emoticons are introduced, a whole new category of emoticons came to life: Text/Word emoticons.

Its often said that a picture is a worth a thousand words, and this is most certainly true. Going by this measure, an animation is worth a thousands of words, if not more. This can help explain the popularity of this emoticon genre, they greatly simplify the process of writing your thoughts and feelings as text and help draw attention to the important words in your messages.

These emoticons aren't just limited to words and chat lingo, lots of punctuation emoticons are also available: question marks, exclamations, dots, periods, etc!

The icons aren't just animated versions of text either, some of them are quite imaginative, clever and creative. For example, a Hi emoticon with a waving hand, a BRB icon with a running man, love and romantic text emoticons with lots of hearts, a bit of worldplay, etc.

These icons can help reduce the wordiness of your messages and get your thoughts across with only a single icon. In today's busy world, less wordage is almost never a bad thing, but see below for some usage guidelines.

Text emoticon usage and guidelines

Word emoticons can also make some words easier to type, with the use of emoticon shortcuts. For example: you might have an emoticon for a common word like 'Hello' or 'Thanks', you can then assign an easy to type keyboard shortcut like 'hi' or 'thx' for that emoticon to make it faster to type. You can easily change this shortcut once you have added the icons to Messenger

Some people would probably say that there are users who go too far these icons, to the point that there are several animated emoticons sent along with each of their messages (not to mention the non-textual smileys they use). This can become somewhat annoying, so just like with all other great things in life, please try to use word and text emoticons in moderation.

Others also feel that receiving a completely textless message containing nothing but icons feels rather effortless and dismissive, and may make you seem uninterested in the conversation. So once again, try to use them with control, and avoid sending too many wordless messages to your friends.

It should also be noted that almost all of these emoticons are generally not suitable for use in an important communication, where sentences are worded in a somewhat more unplayful way. Using a text emoticon in a serious or business context could have a negative effect on the vibe of the conversation.