An Emoticon (or Smiley) is a sequence of ordinary characters that you find on your computer keyboard. Emoticons are used in e-mail and other forms of communication using computers. The most popular Emoticon is the smiling face :-) called a 'Smiley'. They help convey a particular tone or emotion in conjunction with a communication via e-mail, chat or news-groups. Use them whenever your text message can't get the point across on its own. TIP If you are not able to decipher Emoticons, tip your head to the left and look at it again. For instance, in the smiley, :-), the colon represents the eyes, the dash represents the nose and the right parenthesis represents the mouth. These Emoticons show an emotion through an icon. Over a hundred of these Emoticons are being used. The online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) deals with fresh additions to the English vocabulary, a result of the increasing use of the Internet. The smiling, winking or frowning faces constructed from punctuation marks add emotional meaning to the messages.

In the 'fascinetting' world of the Internet, a very modern, wonderfully literary and ultra-rich language is brewing. Chatspeak, is another language altogether. And entering the portals of Net-talk without knowing the fundamentals might just leave you feeling shortchanged! Just keep in mind that when you chat, you have to ignore concepts like grammar, spelling or a logical flow of conversation. Here's some CHATLINGO to GYG (get you going).