This website explains many kinds of emoticons.
An Emoticon (or Smiley) is a sequence of ordinary characters you can find on your computer keyboard. Emoticons are used in e-mail, (snap)chat, SMS, Whatsapp and other forms of communication using computers.
The most popular emoticons are the smiling faces (smileys or smilies) that people use to say "don't take what I just wrote too seriously". If you don't see that it represents a smiling face, tip your head to the left and look at it again. The colon represents the eyes, the dash represents the nose, and the right parenthesis represent the mouth.
These emoticons show an Emotion through an 'Icon'. Over hundreds of these Emoticons are being used. The most common and funniest ones can be found at this website.