30 Emoticons: How to Make Faces, Things and Animals with Your Keyboard

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Emoticons – those smileys and other faces made out of letters and symbols on your keyboard – are a great way to inject a little fun into your emails, online messages and text messages.

Learning them is also a great way to get very familiar with your keyboard!

I showed you how to make some smiley faces and other basic emoticons with your keyboard in a previous Tech Tip – that’s a good place to get started. If you’re having a blast with emoticons and want to learn a more, then here are animals, expressions and other fun ones to liven up your emails and messages!

A couple of quick tips before we get started:

• When you’re typing emoticons don’t type spaces between characters.
• Some of the examples below call for an “underscore” – it is made by holding down the shift key and the hyphen key at the same time.
• Some call for a “bullet.” On a PC, make a bullet by holding down Alt+7; on a Mac, make a bullet by holding down option+8.

Expressions

Tongue in Cheek
:-J   colon + minus sign + capital J

Tongue Tied
:-&   colon + minus sign + ampersand

Blushing
=^_^=   equal sign + caret + underscore + caret + equal sign

Alarmed
:-o   colon + minus sign + lowercase o

Laughing out Loud
=-D  equal sign + minus sign + capital D

Angry
>_<   greater than sign + underscore + less than sign

In Love
(*_*)   open parentheses + asterisk + underscore + asterisk + close parentheses

Bored
(-_-)   open parentheses + minus sign + underscore + minus sign + close parentheses

Annoyed
>_<*   greater than sign + underscore + less than sign + asterisk

Shy
(*^_^*)  open parenthesis + asterisk + carat + underscore + carat + asterisk + close parenthesis

Want to see more? Click here to find even more expressions emoticons.

Objects

Birthday Hat
*<:)   asterisk + less than sign + colon + close parentheses

Bed
0_  zero + underscore

Rose
@~)~~~~   “at” sign + tilde + close parentheses + several tildes

Eye
<•>  greater than + bullet + less than

Airplane
-|–‘  hyphen + straight slash + straight slash + apostrophe

Christmas Tree
*<<<<=   asterisk + several less than signs + equal sign

Gift
8[+]   number 8 + open bracket + plus sign + close bracket

Four Leaf Clover
%%-   percentage sign + percentage sign + minus sign

Bicycle
(*)/(*)   open parenthesis + asterisk + close parenthesis + forward slash + open parenthesis + asterisk + close parenthesis

See more emoticons that represent objects and things.

Animals

Bird
(*V*)   open parenthesis + asterisk + capital V + asterisk + close parenthesis

Cat
=^.^=   equal sign + carat + period + carat + equal sign

Dog
:o3   colon + lowercase o + number 3

Fish
<><   less than sign + greater sign + less than sign

Mouse
<:3)~   less than sign + colon + number 3 + close parentheses + tilde

Pig
=8)   equal sign + number 8 + closed parentheses

Bee
:(III)-   colon + open parentheses + three vertical bars + close parentheses + minus sign

Owl
^o,o^   caret + lowercase o + comma + lowercase o + caret

Penguin
( *)>   open parentheses + asterisk + close parentheses + greater than sign

Rabbit
(‘.’)   open parentheses + apostrophe + period + apostrophe + close parentheses

Snail
_@_v   underscore + at sign + underscore + lowercase v

Some fun emoticons are more complicated. Like this dinosaur, for example!

_…_        

( ”  \>       

   \  \>      

    \  \>     

     \  \>___ 

    /        \

    |  ….   |>

    \ /    \ /

    ||     ||

   C./    C./

In this case, you’d be better off copying and pasting the emoticon so you don’t have to painstakingly retype each character and letter. Check out more animal emoticons here.

Click here to see how to make basic emoticons like smiley faces.

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Have fun! And feel free to practice in the comments box below :)