Emotes

Emote means to express emotion. In MMORPGs emotes make your character express emotion.

In World of Warcraft, you can make your character "emote" by using predefined slash commands. These commands generate a chat message (typically in a special color) that describes what your character is doing. This chat message is often accompanied by audio and some character action.

For example, using the /thanks command, text displays ("Character thanks target."), an audio file is played (character voice: "Thank you."), and a character animation occurs (character gesticulates).

There are 4 kinds of emotes in World of Warcraft:

Text only
Text + Vocalization
Text + Character Animation
Text + Vocalization + Character Animation

A great breakdown of emotes are listed here and the original Blizzard guide can be seen here.