tone indicator

English

Examples
/gen – indicates a genuine question /s – indicates a sarcastic statement /srs – indicates a statement said in a serious manner

Noun

tone indicator (plural tone indicators)

1. (linguistics, chiefly Internet) A symbol conveying the tone or context of a message, often over the internet.

   Synonyms: tone tag, mood indicator

   • 1990, Geoffrey Nunberg, chapter 5, in The Linguistics of Punctuation‎^[1], Cambridge University Press, page 65:

     For one thing, it helps to shed light on the nature of the question mark and the exclamation point – the "tone indicators" – which I have not considered up to here.

   • 2020 December 9, Ezra Marcus, “Tone Is Hard to Grasp Online. Can Tone Indicators Help?”, in The New York Times‎^[2], archived from the original on 4 July 2021:

     But what tone indicators lack in artfulness, they make up for in their bulletproof inability to be misinterpreted.

See also

• Category:English tone indicators