Spice up your Messenger with these free smilies

All of these free smilies can be downloaded and used with your favourite messenger software such as MSN, Yahoo, AIM and any other messenger program that allows you to use custom smilies. Simply select the smilie(s) you like, right click it and choose "save as" to save it to your computer. Check out our FAQ section for guides on how to integrate these smilies with your favourite messenger program.

Give your forum some flavour with these free smilies

These free smilies can also be used to spice up any forum! All you need to do is simply find the smilie(s) you like and copy the linking code (we provide the necessary BB Code under every smilie) and paste it into your message when posting on your favourite forum (Thats right, you are allowed to link directly to the smilie!).



The origin of the smiley is not completely clear. The earliest known examples of the graphic are attributed to Harvey Ball, who devised the face in 1963 for a Worcester, Massachusetts, USA-based insurance firm, State Mutual Life Assurance. Ball never attempted to use, promote or trademark the image; it fell into the public domain in the United States before that could be accomplished.

However, Franklin Loufrani of London-based company says he came up with the image in 1971 for a newspaper promotion in which he displayed his emoticons to highlight good news. He then started developing products using this logo(emoticons) as a brand. The logo and the name are trademarked by Franklin Loufrani across 100 countries for most classes of goods and services. His master licensee is developing products with licensed partners in industries such as clothing, accessories, home textiles, food and confectionery, stationery, toys, gift items, housewares, publishing and fragrances. In 1997 ,his son Nicolas Loufrani started developing hundreds of variations of the Smiley logo with many different moods and categories such as weather, occupations, countries, animals, objects and so forth. He also developed a character based version with a body, arms and legs. They were the first non-text based smileys available to use on the web.

After this period, a wide range of websites started to emerge with the idea of offering free smiley to their visitors. These free smiley providers are often powered by user that submit free smileys to them or offer free smileys form the public domain. Other free smiley providers design their own free smileys and offer them on their free smiley websites as well.

In addition to the above, you can find smiley face, msn emoticons, msn smilie, yahoo smiley, yahoo emoticon, yahoo messenger emoticon, yahoo hidden emoticon, hidden emoticon as well as well as aim smiley.