A smiley is a simple drawing of a smiling face, usually just a circle with two dots for eyes and a curved line for a mouth. The classic smiley is bright yellow with a big grin, and you've probably seen it on stickers, T-shirts, or emoji. It was created in 1963 by a graphic designer named Harvey Ball, who was paid just $45 to design something cheerful for an insurance company.

The word also refers to any of the little faces people type using keyboard characters, like :-) or :), which make you tilt your head sideways. These text smileys were invented in 1982 by a computer scientist who wanted to show when he was joking in messages. Before emoji existed, people got creative making faces from punctuation marks: ;-) for a wink, :-( for sadness, or :-P for sticking out your tongue.

Today, when someone mentions a smiley, they might mean the classic yellow face, a typed character face, or even modern emoji. The simple smiley proved so useful for expressing feelings in writing that it evolved into hundreds of colorful emoji on our phones and computers.