Kaomoji (顏文字)
Japanese-style horizontal emoticons to copy. What kaomoji are, why they read upright, and how they differ from emoji.
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What a kaomoji is
Kaomoji — 顔文字, “face characters” — are faces built from ordinary text characters, read the right way up. Western emoticons are rotated:
:-) turn your head to read it
(＾▽＾) already facing youThat difference is the whole design. Japanese kaomoji emerged on 1980s bulletin boards where the character set was large enough to draw a face directly, so there was no reason to lie it on its side. Western emoticons emerged on ASCII-only systems where there was.
The larger repertoire also means the eyes carry the expression, not the mouth — which
matches a real difference in how emotion is read in Japan and the West, and is why
(￣▽￣) and (￣ω￣) feel different despite sharing a mouth.
Kaomoji are not emoji
| Kaomoji | Emoji | |
|---|---|---|
| Made of | ordinary characters | one dedicated character |
| Length | 5–30 characters | 1–2 |
| Appearance | depends on the font | depends on the platform |
| Colour | your text colour | fixed |
| Searchable | yes, as text | as a character |
A kaomoji is text all the way down, so it inherits your font, colour and size, and it can be typed by anyone with the right characters. An emoji is a single code point that the platform draws for you.
Where they break
Because a kaomoji is a sequence of characters drawn from several Unicode blocks, it depends on the font having all of them:
- Missing glyphs show as boxes.
٩(◕‿◕)۶uses Arabic letters as arms; a font without Arabic coverage will break it. - Combining marks can render off-centre.
(๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧combines a Thai character with a Korean one and two combining accents, and lands differently in different renderers. - Proportional versus monospace. Table-flip kaomoji like
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻are drawn with box-drawing characters that assume equal widths. They look correct in a monospace font and slightly crooked in a proportional one.
If a kaomoji has to survive an unknown environment, the safe ones are those built from
Latin, basic Japanese punctuation and ASCII — ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is the most robust in this list,
using only a macron, a katakana tsu, and ASCII.
The shrug, and the backslash problem
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is the most-copied kaomoji in the English-speaking world, and the one most
often pasted wrong.
The backslash is the problem. In any environment that treats \ as an escape character —
Slack, Markdown, many chat clients, most programming languages — a single backslash may
vanish or alter what follows. The usual result is ¯_(ツ)_/¯, missing an arm.
Where that happens, escape it: type ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ and let the system reduce it to one.
Reading the common ones
| Kaomoji | Reads as |
|---|---|
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ | who knows, not my problem |
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ | rage, giving up |
┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ) | calm restored, putting the table back |
(⌐■_■) | deal with it |
(¬_¬) | unimpressed, side-eye |
(´･ω･`) | small, meek, apologetic |
ヽ(´ー`)ノ | never mind, relaxed |
(；´д｀)ゞ | worn out |
The table-flip and its restoration are conventionally used as a pair, in sequence — the second is the reply to the first.