Here’s what every emoticon really means

Emoticons are pretty important:

• Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker says they're an extremely useful linguistic evolution.
• The Oxford English Dictionary named "crying face" the word of the year.
• Humans collectively send 6 billion emoticons every day.

But they don't teach emoticons in school, and some of them are actually hard to understand — at least for some of us.

Below we've listed the actual definitions for all the main emoticons.