It never got an emoji. It never needed one. Reddit still types it every day.
$xD, paired with $RDDT on Stonk
01 / Story
X for shut eyes, D for an open mouth. Tilt your head left. That is the whole design, and nobody owns it.
Every other platform buried emoticons under stickers and reactions. Reddit stayed a text box and a comment thread, so the two keys never got replaced.
Scroll any big subreddit and it is still there, mostly from the older half of the internet who learned to laugh in plain text.
The laugh has a home. Now it has a ticker.
02 / Lore
2000s
X for shut eyes, D for an open mouth. Know Your Meme dates the rise of xD to forum, gaming and messenger culture of the 2000s. No author, no owner.
knowyourmeme.com/memes/xd2003
Urban Dictionary logs it plainly: "XD laughing, eyes shut". A dictionary entry for something people were already typing every day.
Urban Dictionary2005
Reddit launches as a text box and a comment thread. No stickers, no reactions. Typed emoticons stay the native way to laugh there.
reddit.com2010
Unicode 6.0 ships a squinting laughing face, described as the emoji form of xD. An approximation, never the two keys themselves.
Emojipedia2024
Linguists are still running corpus studies on xD against the tears of joy emoji. The emoticon refuses to become history.
CMC 2024 paperMarch 2024
Reddit Inc prices at 34 dollars, lists on the NYSE as RDDT and closes its debut up 48 percent. The house xD never left is now a ticker.
Reuters03 / Make yours
Drop in any picture and stick the eyes and the tongue on it. Drag, size, tilt, download.