smiley
smiley Lexical Profile
smiley Game Scores & Validity
• noun
A stylized graphic representation of a smiling human face, typically depicted as a yellow circle with two dots for eyes and an upward-curving arc for a mouth, or an electronic emoticon or emoji conveying a facial expression.
"She added a quick smiley at the end of her text message to show she was joking."
• adjective
Having a pleasant, cheerful smile, or inclined to smile frequently.
"The baby was unusually smiley this morning and greeted everyone with a laugh."
Word Nuance & Usage
As an adjective, it is spelled either "smiley" or "smily", whereas the noun referring to a graphic icon or emoticon is almost exclusively spelled "smiley".
• Rhymes for smiley
Word Origin & Etymology
Formed in the mid-19th century as an adjective from the noun "smile" plus the suffix "-y". The noun sense referring to the stylized yellow graphic face emerged in the early 1960s and was later adopted into early digital communication to describe text-based emoticons.