Text Faces and Kaomoji

Last reviewed on October 31, 2026

Kaomoji and emoticons

Western emoticons like :) and :D are read sideways and use only keyboard characters. Japanese kaomoji, a word meaning face characters, read upright and borrow letters from many scripts, which is why you see ツ from katakana in the shrug and ಠ from Kannada in the look of disapproval. That variety makes them expressive and also harder to display.

Copy the whole string

Each face is a sequence of characters, so select and copy it whole. Font coverage matters. If one character is missing, a box can appear in the middle of the face, and different fonts may draw eyes and mouths at different widths. Faces that mix emoji, like the heart on a sweet face, may be shown in color.

Markdown and chat tips

Slack, Discord, Reddit and GitHub use Markdown, where underscores and backslashes have special meaning. The shrug ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ often loses its arm because the backslash is eaten, so write it as ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ in those apps. Wrapping a face in backticks also keeps it intact.

Using them well

A face works best at the end of a message, where it sets the tone. Overly long faces can wrap onto two lines in narrow chat windows, so shorter ones like (^_^) and :) are more reliable. Some faces, such as the table flip, are meant as jokes, so keep them for casual conversations.