Lenny face ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

The Lenny face is a wink in text form. It adds innuendo, mischief or smug suggestion to a message: “Saw you two leaving the party together ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).” It also works as playful trolling in gaming chats and on forums.

It has circulated online since the early 2010s and is a fixture of meme culture. Because the tone is suggestive, it’s fine among friends but out of place in work chats, customer messages or anything you wouldn’t want screenshotted. When in doubt, a plain 😉 carries less baggage.

The Lenny face looks simple, but it uses characters from several Unicode blocks:

• ° (degree sign) for the eyes
• ͡ (combining double inverted breve, U+0361) above the eyes, for raised eyebrows
• ͜ (combining double breve below, U+035C) under the nose, for the smile
• ʖ (Latin letter inverted glottal stop, U+0296) for the nose
• spaces and parentheses for the head

The two combining marks don’t stand alone. They attach to the character before them and stretch across two characters, which is why the face can look misaligned in some fonts and why deleting or retyping one character can make an eyebrow jump. Always copy the whole face at once.

Its cousin ಠ_ಠ, the look of disapproval, uses ಠ, a letter of the Kannada script of southern India, for the staring eyes.

• Phones: save it as a text replacement, such as “lenny,” in your keyboard settings, so you never have to rebuild it.
• Discord and Reddit: the Lenny face contains no backslashes or asterisks, so Markdown leaves it alone and it posts as-is.
• Usernames and game names: some platforms strip combining marks or limit the characters you can use. Test before you rely on it.
• Accessibility: screen readers may announce each character separately, so in messages that need to be accessible, say what you mean in words.