tone indicator

plural tone indicators

1. Internethuman sciencesA symbol conveying the tone or context of a message, often over the internet.

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

   2020 December 9, Ezra Marcus, “Tone Is Hard to Grasp Online. Can Tone Indicators Help?”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 04 Jul 2021

   1 more example

   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.

   1990, Geoffrey Nunberg, chapter 5, in The Linguistics of Punctuation, Cambridge University Press, page 65

   Synonyms: tone tag, mood indicator