Text faces and kaomoji to copy and paste

Classic Western emoticons are read with your head tilted: :) is a smile, ;) a wink, :( a frown. Kaomoji come from Japanese online culture (kao means face, moji means character) and are read upright. The eyes do most of the talking, so (^_^) is happy, (T_T) is crying and (⊙_⊙) is shocked. Arms, cheeks and props get added around them: ٩(◕‿◕)۶ is a happy dance, ʕっ•ᴥ•ʔっ a hugging bear, ( ˘▽˘)っ♨ someone holding a hot drink.

This page groups faces by mood: happy, love, sad, angry, animals, hugs, sleepy and more. Search works on English words, so typing hug, cat or blush narrows the grid.

Meanings are informal and depend on who you're talking to. The Lenny face in particular reads as flirty or cheeky, so it's not a great fit for a work chat.

Text faces are built from characters of many scripts, which is why they're hard to type by hand. Click a single character in the detail panel's text box and you can look up its name:

• ツ is KATAKANA LETTER TU, the Japanese syllable tsu, used as a smiling face.
• ʖ in the Lenny face is LATIN LETTER INVERTED GLOTTAL STOP, a phonetic letter that makes the nose and mouth.
• The Lenny face's eyebrows are combining marks (COMBINING DOUBLE INVERTED BREVE above, COMBINING DOUBLE BREVE BELOW under the mouth). They attach to the character before them, so in some fonts the face looks slightly shifted.
• ಠ is KANNADA LETTER TTHA, a letter from South India, used as staring eyes.
• ┻━┻ is drawn with box-drawing characters, and ︵ is a vertical-text parenthesis turned into a flying arc.
• ᴥ in bear faces is LATIN LETTER AIN, a phonetic letter shaped like a snout.

Discord, Reddit and many other sites format messages with Markdown. In Markdown a backslash escapes the next character, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ turns into ¯_(ツ)_/¯ with the left arm missing, and the underscores can even turn part of your message italic.

The fix is to double the backslash. Type or paste this instead:

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

The extra backslash is consumed by the formatting and the shrug arrives intact. On Discord you can also use the built-in /shrug and /tableflip commands, which insert those faces for you. In plain-text places such as text messages, email or game chat, paste the normal version.

• They work almost everywhere. Kaomoji are plain text, so they show up in places with no emoji support, like some game chats, code comments and old phones.
• Watch the font. Faces were designed for fonts where every character is about the same width. In a narrow font the arms or the table may drift a bit.
• Texting costs: characters outside the basic SMS alphabet switch a text message to Unicode encoding, which fits fewer characters per message segment.
• Accessibility: a screen reader reads a face character by character, often as a string of odd names. Use a face as a reaction, not to carry information.
• Build your own: add several faces or parts to the text box at the bottom of the page, edit them, and copy the result. Recently used faces stay at the top of the page, stored only in your browser.