Love emoticons? Gmail’s got you covered. You can now add more than 1,000 of them to your emails

Emoticons: either you love them or you hate them. Personally, I’m closer to the ‘hate’ camp, but when it comes to expressing an emotion, why use ten words when a winking smiley face will do? Google clearly knows that many people love emoticons, as it’s now added a choice of well over 1,000 of the things to its new compose window in Gmail.

You’ll find them by hovering your mouse pointer over the ‘+’ symbol next to the attachment icon. If it’s enabled for you (one of my accounts has a ‘coming soon’ message, the other has them activated) you’ll be able to scroll through pages and pages of emoticons – everything from a traditional smiley face to the likes of an animated unpeeling banana, a ringing bell and a launching rocket.

Now, Gmail’s had emoticons for a long time but they’re new to the recently-redesigned compose window, and the choice has been massively expanded. We counted a total of 1,287 in the new menu versus just 158 in the old one, which may sound like overkill, but hey, choice is a good thing, right?

Of course, if you hate emoticons, watch out, your inbox might be about to get flooded with your ‘wacky’ friends’ ‘fun’ messages. Bah, humbug.

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