Emoticons: no noses please

I work on text input for mobile devices, e.g. making it easier to type text messages.

Recently we have been reviewing our support for entering emoticons. In one meeting, I observed that it seems to be more common to type emoticons without noses than with them these days. Since we take an empirical approach to these questions, we thought we'd look at our English web corpus. Sure enough, in the period 2007 to early 2010, the nose-less forms are about four times more common than the nose forms i.e. :) beats :-) and ;) beats ;-).

This is of course a perfectly natural linguistic development: words undergo reduction in form over time. It'd be fascinating to take a finer-grained look at the frequencies.