Why :) Turns Into 🙂, and How to Turn It Off in Every App

Your :) turns into 🙂 because the app you are typing in carries its own little dictionary of emoticons and swaps each one for an emoji the moment you finish typing it. Only five products document doing this: Microsoft Word with classic Outlook, new Outlook with Outlook on the web, Slack, Webex and Zulip. Each has its own list, and every one of them can be switched off. The exact switches are below, along with the strings that get converted by accident.

We read every vendor help page cited here on 20 October 2026, and our emoticon to emoji tracker keeps the same data in one place. This guide is about the side effects: what breaks, what never converts, and how to send a plain colon and bracket when you mean one.

Why an app would rewrite your punctuation in the first place

Emoticons are older than emoji by decades, and people never stopped typing them. When colour emoji arrived on desktops, software makers had two options: teach users a new picker, or meet them halfway by catching the old habit and upgrading it. Most chat and office apps that bothered chose the second.

The catch is that there is no shared rulebook. Unicode encodes 🙂 and 😊 as characters, but it publishes no table saying which emoticon should become which emoji. So every vendor wrote its own mapping, picked its own faces, and decided for itself when the swap fires. That is why the same three keystrokes produce different results depending on the window you are typing in.

Fourteen apps checked, five that document the feature

We looked for an official help article on emoticon conversion for fourteen apps people commonly ask about. The result splits into four groups:

• Converts, and says so (4): Microsoft Word and classic Outlook, Slack, Webex App, Zulip.
• Has an autocorrect switch (1): new Outlook for Windows and Outlook on the web. Microsoft documents an Autocorrect setting here but never mentions emoticons on that page, so treating it as the emoticon control is our reading, not Microsoft's claim.
• Documents something else (2): Microsoft Teams documents typing a colon followed by a name, and Apple Messages documents tapping words that turn orange to swap them for emoji.
• Nothing documented (7): Discord, Gmail, Google Chat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram and Signal.

Only three of the converting apps publish the actual list of codes: Microsoft, Cisco (for Webex) and Zulip. Slack documents the on and off switch but no trigger list, so if you need to know exactly which strings Slack will touch, the honest answer is that Slack has not said.

25 emoticons, three lists, and only four agreements

Put the three published lists side by side and you get 25 distinct emoticons. Microsoft lists 16, Zulip 12, Webex 11. Only 11 of the 25 appear on more than one list, and only three appear on all three: :) :D and ;).

Of those three, just one gives the same result everywhere. ;) becomes 😉 in Word, Webex and Zulip alike. The other two split:

• :) becomes 😊 in Word and Outlook, but 🙂 in Webex and Zulip. Those are different faces with different moods: smiling face with smiling eyes reads warm, while the slightly smiling face has a reputation for sounding passive aggressive.
• :D becomes 😃 in Word and Webex, but 😄 in Zulip. Close, but the eyes differ, and the names differ too: grinning face with big eyes versus grinning face with smiling eyes.

Across every emoticon shared by at least two lists, exactly four map to the same emoji wherever they appear: ;) to 😉, :| to 😐, :O to 😮 and :/ to 😕. Everything else depends on the app. A message drafted in Word and pasted into a chat does not change, of course, since the conversion has already happened. It is the person typing live in each app who gets a different face for the same keys.

Codes only one vendor uses

Fourteen of the 25 appear on a single list. Some are just hyphenated variants Microsoft accepts, such as :-) and :-(. The interesting ones are Webex extras nobody else documents: (y) for 👍, :X for 🤐, D8 for 😱, :'-) for 😂 and :-J for 😏. Zulip alone accepts the reversed (: for 🙂. Microsoft alone handles </3, which becomes 💔.

Text that gets caught by accident

This is where the feature earns its bad reputation. Webex's help page is the only one that spells out the timing rule: the emoticon has to be typed, and a space has to follow it. We ran a set of ordinary sentences through the three published lists using that rule, which is also how our converter on the tracker page behaves. Microsoft and Zulip do not state their exact matching rule, so treat their results as a model rather than a guarantee.

• Vim and editor commands. "Run :o notes.txt to open the file" becomes "Run 😲 notes.txt" under Microsoft's list and "Run 😮 notes.txt" under Zulip's. ":p" in a line about printing a buffer gets the same treatment, ending up as 😝 or 😛.
• Room numbers and grid references. "Meet in room D8 at noon" survives everywhere except Webex, where D8 is the code for face screaming in fear. A seat number, a chess square or a spreadsheet cell written the same way is exposed to it too.
• Shorthand yes. "Sounds good (y) thanks" turns into a thumbs up in Webex. That one is probably what you meant anyway.
• Maths written in chat. "x <3 is true when x is 2" picks up a heart in Word and in Zulip, because <3 standing alone matches the heart code. Put spaces around the operator, as in "x < 3", and nothing matches.
• A frown that was really a shrug at a link. "https://example.com :/ not sure" converts the :/ to 😕 in Webex and Zulip. The :/ inside https:// is safe, because it is glued to the letters around it.

And some things that look risky are fine. "Step 8) save the file" never converts, because 8) is on none of the three published lists, even though plenty of people read it as a sunglasses face. "3:D" does not convert under the stand-alone rule either, since the :D is attached to the digit.

Two Microsoft details nobody mentions

Microsoft's support page lists the code point behind each conversion, and two of them stand out. A frown, :( becomes U+2639 and a heart, <3 becomes U+2764. Both are characters from long before the emoji era, and Microsoft's table gives them without the invisible variation selector that asks for colour. Zulip's heart, by contrast, is the full ❤️ with that selector attached. In practice a bare U+2764 can show as a flat black symbol in some fonts and as a red heart in others, so a Word heart can look different once it leaves Word.

The second detail is the font. Microsoft's own troubleshooting note says that if the converted emoticon shows as a box, the Segoe UI Emoji font may be missing, and suggests running the System File Checker to repair system files. Older Office versions and Windows 7 used black and white Wingdings characters instead; for the smiley that was F04A. The last two digits, 4A, are the position of a capital J in ordinary text, which is why mail from an old Outlook could show a stray J where a smile was meant.

Apps people assume convert, but whose vendors say nothing

The questions we see most are about apps on the undocumented list. Here is exactly what each vendor does document, so you know what is confirmed and what is folklore.

• Microsoft Teams. Microsoft's current Teams help describes typing a colon and a name, then picking from a list. That is a shortcode picker, the same idea our emoji shortcodes reference covers for Slack, Discord and GitHub. We found no Microsoft page saying Teams turns :) into an emoji automatically, so we list no trigger table or switch for it.
• Apple Messages. Apple documents something different: after you type, words you could replace turn orange, and tapping one swaps it for an emoji. It acts on words, not on punctuation, and nothing changes unless you tap. Apple's page does not mention emoticons at all.
• Discord. The Discord client has a setting for converting emoticons, but Discord has published no help article for it. Without one we cannot tell you its list, so we leave it out rather than guess.
• Gmail, Google Chat, WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, Signal. We found no vendor documentation of emoticon conversion for any of them.

Undocumented does not mean it never happens. It means no vendor has put the behaviour in writing, so there is no list to check and no official switch to point you to. If you see a conversion in one of these apps, the cause may sit outside the app, and we would rather say we do not know than publish a guess.

Sending a literal :) on purpose

Sometimes the emoticon is the point: you are quoting someone, writing about emoticons, or you simply prefer the look. You have more options than switching the whole feature off.

1. Undo just that one. Microsoft documents that Ctrl+Z undoes the autocorrection as you type in Word and classic Outlook. You get your characters back and the next emoticon still converts.
2. Delete a single entry. Also in Word and classic Outlook: open AutoCorrect Options, type the emoticon into the Replace box, highlight the entry and choose Delete. Everything else keeps working.
3. Paste it in Webex. Cisco says emoticons are only translated when typed into the message area, so pasting one leaves it alone.
4. Switch off the app setting in Slack or Zulip, using the paths further down.
5. Use a kaomoji instead. None of the three published lists contains a kaomoji, so a face like (^_^) or ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ goes through untouched.

We checked that last point against our own collection rather than assuming it. Of the distinct kaomoji in our kaomoji collection, 46 contain one of the published trigger sequences somewhere inside them, nearly always ;) where a sweat drop meets a closing bracket, as in (ﾟДﾟ;). Not one of them has the trigger standing on its own, so none of them converts under the stand-alone rule. The same holds for our text faces and the rest of the text art sets. If you have never met kaomoji before, our guide to Japanese text emoticons explains where they come from.

The off switch in each app

Menu names are quoted as they appear in each app's English interface.

Microsoft Word

File, Options, Proofing, AutoCorrect Options, then clear Replace text as you type. Note that this disables every AutoCorrect replacement, not just emoticons. Deleting single entries (above) is the gentler fix.

Classic Outlook

File, Options, Mail, Editor Options, Proofing, AutoCorrect Options, then clear Replace text as you type.

New Outlook and Outlook on the web

Editor, Editor Settings, Autocorrect. Microsoft notes separately that Outlook on the web supports AutoCorrect but you cannot add or remove words from its list, so there is no per-emoticon option. It is everything or nothing.

Slack

Click your profile picture in the sidebar, choose Preferences, then Messages & media, and under Emoji untick Convert typed emoticons to emoji. Slack's article gives desktop steps only.

Zulip

Gear icon, Personal settings, Preferences, then under Emoji toggle Convert emoticons before sending. The setting's name suggests it acts when you send, not as you type.

Webex App

Cisco's article documents the conversion but no setting to disable it. Pasting is the documented way around it.

Our view: turn it off for anything technical

If you write about code, commands, maths or anything with brackets in it, switch conversion off. The failures are quiet. A 😲 in the middle of a Vim instruction looks like a joke to the reader, and in a long Word document you may never notice it happened. Support teams pasting customer messages into a ticket have the same problem in reverse: the quote no longer matches what the customer typed.

Work email is the other place it pays to be deliberate. A 😊 that you did not choose lands differently from a typed :) with a manager or a client, and our notes on emoji in business communication go into why tone carries so much weight there.

When leaving it on makes sense

For fast, casual chat it is a genuine convenience. Typing ;) is quicker than opening a picker, and in Webex or Zulip the codes are few enough to learn in a minute. If most of what you type is short replies to colleagues, the risk of a stray conversion is low.

Just learn your own app's list rather than assuming they match, because they mostly do not. Someone moving between Word and Zulip all day sends two different smiles for the same keys. And if you want an emoji you can reach on purpose without any of this, colon shortcodes are the more predictable route; our comparison of shortcodes across Slack, Discord and GitHub shows where those disagree too. For pickers and keyboard shortcuts on each system, see how to type emoji on any device.

Where every claim here comes from

Each fact about an app comes from that vendor's own help page, read on 20 October 2026. Where a vendor publishes nothing, we say so instead of filling the gap.

• Microsoft, AutoCorrect emojis in documents and email (Word and classic Outlook triggers, code points, off switch, Ctrl+Z): support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/autocorrect-emojis-in-documents-and-email-601cad94-1a54-41e2-8cf8-4b09a6eadfe1
• Microsoft, AutoCorrect in new Outlook and Outlook on the web: support.microsoft.com/en-us/word/autocorrect-auto-capitalize-and-auto-format-your-messages and support.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/add-or-remove-autocorrect-entries-in-outlook
• Slack, Manage your emoji preferences: slack.com/help/articles/4406393601683-Manage-your-emoji-preferences
• Cisco, Webex App: Turn emoticons into emoji in your messages: help.webex.com/en-us/article/na2v31d/
• Zulip, Configure emoticon translations: zulip.com/help/configure-emoticon-translations
• Microsoft, Send an emoji, GIF or sticker in Microsoft Teams: support.microsoft.com/en-us/teams/chat/send-an-emoji-gif-or-sticker-in-microsoft-teams
• Apple, Use emoji on your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch: support.apple.com/102507

Cisco publishes its list as images rather than text, so the Webex glyphs above are our identification of those images. We left out Webex's :( entirely, because its image does not make clear which of two frowning faces it is.