Decoding the secret language of online texters

When you're "talking" to an online friend in an e-mail message, you can't see each other's faces, so you miss the smiles, winks, and frowns that add subtle meaning to conversation and lend context to cold words. Longtime navigators of the electronic network have come up with a substitute.

If you've been wondering about the odd bits of misplaced punctuation that dot and freckle many messages, here's how to solve the mystery: just tip your head to the left and take a closer look.

That peculiar combination of colon, hyphen, and closing parenthesis :-) viewed from the side suddenly snaps into the familiar smiley face and takes the place of a friendly smile. Sometimes called an "emoticon," it's an icon reflecting emotion, and it's almost as useful a tool for online communication as the ABCs.

The smile, however, is only the beginning. Creative communicators have worked out an entire portrait gallery of smiles, frowns, winks, grins, and grimaces that express the writer's mood and personality and add another dimension to the words on the screen. Here are a few of the most common emoticons, just to get you started:

In addition to emoticons, experienced users have adopted a variety of shorthand abbreviations to save time and keystrokes in expressing frequently repeated concepts. Here's a beginners glossary: