Kaomoji
Tap a face to copy it. Kaomoji are Japanese emoticons made of letters and symbols, grouped here by mood and by animal.
may turn into a color emoji on some phones may show a box on older phones
Happy
Sad
Love
Cute
Angry
Shrug and table flip
Bears
Cats
Dogs
What kaomoji are and how they differ from emoji
Kaomoji (顔文字, "face characters") started on Japanese message boards in the 1980s. Western emoticons like :) are read sideways. Kaomoji are read the right way up, with the eyes and mouth in the middle: (^_^), (◕‿◕), (╥﹏╥). Japanese keyboards had a large set of symbols, so people built very expressive faces out of them.
Emoji are pictures that each phone brand draws its own way. Kaomoji are plain text, so they take the color of your text and look much the same in any app. They also say things emoji cannot: a bear flipping a table, a shrug, a face hiding behind its hands.
Because they are text, kaomoji can be long. A table flip like (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ is 12 characters, so for a name with a length limit, short faces like (ᵔᴥᵔ) work better.
Kaomoji for chats, comments and bios
Pick by mood. The happy faces make a friendly sign-off, the sad and crying ones soften bad news, and the love faces are for replies to friends. Cute faces like (˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶) and the animal faces are the ones people put in a bio, next to a name or at the end of a caption.
You can add your own words around a face. Tap a face, then type in the string box under the faces and copy it all. For a heart to go with a love face, see heart symbol copy and paste. For sparkles and flowers, see copy and paste symbols.
Kaomoji borrow characters from many alphabets: Japanese katakana, Greek, Cyrillic, Thai, Kannada and more. A few faces marked with a dashed dot use rarer characters that older phones may not have. They can show a box on an old Android phone, so use a face without the mark when it matters.
Shrug, table flip and the Lenny face
A few kaomoji are famous enough to have names. The shrug ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ means "who knows" or "oh well". The table flip (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ is mock rage, usually answered with ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ), someone putting the table back. ಠ_ಠ is the look of disapproval, made from the Kannada letter ಠ.
The Lenny face ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) is a smirk with raised eyebrows, used for a cheeky joke. It is built from marks that sit on top of other characters, so it looks slightly different from font to font, and it is the face most likely to look broken in a game name.
"Deal with it", (•_•) ( •_•)>⌐■-■ (⌐■_■), is a tiny story in three frames: a face puts on sunglasses. It works best on a line of its own.
Why some kaomoji break when you paste them
Discord, Reddit, Slack and other apps that use Markdown treat some characters as formatting. A backslash hides the character after it and underscores make text italic, so the shrug ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ often loses an arm and shows as ¯_(ツ)_/¯. Type it as ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ to escape both, or put the face between backticks so the app shows it as code. Discord also has a /shrug command that adds it for you.
Asterisks cause the same problem. In (*^▽^*) the two asterisks can turn the middle into italic text and disappear. Put a backslash before each asterisk, or pick a face without them.
Other faces break because of fonts, not formatting. Faces with stacked marks, like the Lenny face, can drift apart in fonts that place the marks differently. If a face looks off after pasting, try another one from the same mood; there is always a simpler one.
Questions people ask
What does kaomoji mean?
It is Japanese for "face characters": kao (顔) means face and moji (文字) means characters. In English they are also called Japanese emoticons or text faces.
How do I copy a kaomoji?
Tap the face and it is copied. Long-press the text box in your app and choose Paste. To add words, use the string box under the faces.
Why did my shrug lose an arm?
The app read the backslash as formatting. Put the face between backticks, or use the /shrug command if the app has one.
Do kaomoji work on every phone?
Almost all of them do, because they use common characters. Faces with a dashed dot use rarer ones that can show a box on older phones.
Is it free?
Yes. There is no sign-up and nothing to install.