Kaomoji

Kaomoji are the Japanese style of emoticon, and the name literally means face characters. They emerged on Japanese bulletin boards in the mid 1980s, with (^_^) commonly credited to Yasushi Wakabayashi in 1986, and they solved a problem the Western emoticon had solved differently. A smiley like :-) is read by tilting your head, because it is drawn sideways. A kaomoji is read upright, which means it can use the full width of a line and put the expression where a face actually keeps it: in the eyes.

That upright reading is why the eyes carry the emotion across almost the whole set. ಠ_ಠ is disapproval entirely because of its eyes. (╥﹏╥) is crying because of them. (¬_¬) is unimpressed for the same reason. Change nothing but the two eye characters and the same bracketed frame swings from delighted to furious, which is the design principle the whole form runs on.

The characters themselves are borrowed from wherever a suitable shape existed, which is what makes kaomoji so robust. ಠ and ಥ are letters from the Kannada script of southern India. ツ is katakana tsu, an ordinary Japanese syllable rather than a smiley face, doing duty as a grin. ლ comes from Georgian, щ from Cyrillic, ᴥ from a phonetic notation set. Because every piece is a real text character, a kaomoji needs no image, no emoji font and no platform support: it survives being pasted into a game chat, a commit message or a printed document exactly as you copied it.

A few of them use combining marks, which behave differently from ordinary characters. The face ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) is built from marks designed to attach to a neighbouring letter, so a font that positions them poorly, or a text box that measures width strangely, will render it slightly out of alignment or overlapping. Nothing is broken in the copy, the renderer is simply making a judgement call about where a floating mark belongs.

The most practical trap is the shrug. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ contains a backslash, and in Markdown, Slack, Discord and most code editors the backslash is an escape character that gets consumed by the formatter, leaving you with a shrug missing an arm. The fix is to paste it into a plain field, or to type the backslash twice where the platform interprets escapes. Also keep an eye on length: the shrug is eleven characters, and a table flip is longer still, which matters in a display name capped at thirty two.

Common questions

Why does my shrug lose an arm when I paste it?

The shrug contains a backslash, and Markdown-style formatters treat a backslash as an escape character and swallow it along with the underscore that follows. Paste it into a field with no formatting, or type the backslash twice so one of them survives the formatter.

Is ツ a smiley face?

No, it is katakana tsu, an ordinary syllable in the Japanese writing system, roughly equivalent to a letter. It became a stand-in for a grinning face purely because of its shape. To a Japanese reader it is a piece of writing that happens to look cheerful, not a face.

Why does the lenny face look misaligned on my screen?

It is built from combining marks, which are characters designed to attach themselves to the one before. Different fonts and text engines position them differently, so the same sequence can look perfectly balanced in one app and slightly overlapping in another. The underlying text is identical either way.

Do kaomoji work on iPhone, Android and in games?

More reliably than emoji do, because they are made of ordinary text characters that most system fonts already cover, and nothing has to be drawn as a picture. The main risks are length limits in name fields and the occasional rare character showing as a box on an old device.

See also

• Cute symbols
• Heart symbols
• Punctuation and divider symbols
• Bracket and frame symbols