Kaomoji (◕‿◕) Copy and Paste

How kaomoji are built and what the faces mean

Kaomoji (顔文字) is Japanese for face characters: kao means face and moji means character. Each one is a short line of ordinary Unicode characters read upright, so there is no kaomoji font to install.

How to read a face

Western emoticons such as :-) lie on their side and put the feeling in the mouth. Kaomoji stand upright and put it in the eyes: ^ ^ for a smile, T T or ; ; for tears, ಠ ಠ for a hard stare. Brackets draw the outline of the face, the character between the eyes is the mouth or nose, and anything outside the brackets is an arm, a prop or movement. In (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ the two ╯ are arms, ︵ is the arc of the throw and ┻━┻ is the table, upside down.

Why the characters come from so many scripts

A face borrows whatever shape fits. The shrug smirks with a Japanese katakana letter, the look of disapproval stares with a letter from the Kannada script of southern India, and the Lenny face stacks combining marks over two degree signs. To software these are still letters, which has two effects. A device with no font for one of those scripts shows an empty box in the middle of the face. And a screen reader may read the pieces one by one by name, or skip them, so a kaomoji should decorate a message, not carry its meaning.

When a pasted face changes

Apps that format messages with Markdown read the backslash and underscores in the shrug as formatting, so its left arm can vanish after sending. In a plain SMS, one character from outside the basic phone alphabet switches the whole message to an encoding that holds 70 characters per part instead of 160, so a long text with a kaomoji may go out in more parts.

More questions

Is there a kaomoji font?

No. A kaomoji is made of characters that fonts on your device already contain, so nothing needs installing. If part of a face shows as a box, that device lacks a font for the script the character comes from.

Why did my shrug lose an arm after I posted it?

The app treated the backslash as a Markdown escape and removed it. Type the face as ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯, with a backslash in front of each character the app would otherwise format.

How do I type kaomoji on a phone without copying them?

On an iPhone, add the Japanese Kana keyboard in Settings and tap its ^_^ key for a list of faces. On Android, Gboard has a text emoticon tab, marked :-), inside its emoji panel.

What does ツ mean on its own?

It is the katakana letter for the syllable tsu and has no smiling meaning in Japanese. It is used in the shrug only because its three strokes look like two eyes and a smirk.