Kaomoji to Copy & Paste

What is kaomoji?

Kaomoji (顔文字) — literally "face characters" in Japanese — are emoticons built from Unicode letters, punctuation, brackets and diacritics. Unlike the colourful bitmap emojis on your phone keyboard, a kaomoji is just plain text: the entire face exists between the opening and closing bracket, and every pair of eyes, mouth, blush mark or sweat drop is a real character anyone can copy, paste or type. That is why kaomoji feel so legible across every chat app, forum, game, code comment and terminal — the medium does not need emoji fonts or colour.

Classic Western ASCII emoticons (like :-) or ;-) ) are read sideways; kaomoji are read upright. A face such as (ᵔ◡ᵔ) already shows two eyes and a smile without rotating your head, which is why they spread so quickly from Japanese bulletin boards into chat rooms, Twitter, Discord and Twitch.

A short history of kaomoji

The first widely-credited kaomoji is (^_^), attributed to a 1986 post by Yasushi Wakabayashi on the Japanese bulletin board ASCII NET. Western users at the same time were happily typing :) sideways — but Japanese keyboards, and Japanese multi-byte encodings like Shift-JIS, gave users an enormous palette of full-width brackets, kana and symbols. Over the late 1980s and early 1990s, Japanese forum culture (2channel and its descendants especially) turned this palette into a folk art: thousands of face variations, each with a subtly different emotion.

By the late 1990s the table-flip (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ and the shrug ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ had crossed into English-language internet culture. The shrug in particular became so iconic that it was featured as a reaction on Slack, Discord, macOS text replacement and countless meme templates. Today kaomoji coexist with Unicode emojis, but they fill a different niche — ironic, text-first, sometimes ASCII-pure, sometimes absurdly elaborate.

Kaomoji vs. emoji vs. emoticon

• Emoticon — a sideways face made from a few ASCII punctuation marks: :-), ;-P, :<.
• Kaomoji — an upright text face using Japanese-style characters: (｡◕‿◕｡), (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻.
• Emoji — a picture character encoded in Unicode, rendered as a colour glyph by the operating system: 😀 🎉 🌸.

All three are "pictographic communication", but only emoji require an emoji-aware font. Kaomoji work everywhere text works — including places emoji notoriously break, like terminals, old web forms, LaTeX documents, git commit messages and monospaced code editors.

How kaomoji are built

Most kaomoji follow a simple pattern: [left bracket][left cheek/hand][left eye][mouth][right eye][right cheek/hand][right bracket]. Swapping a single component changes the emotion dramatically — the same brackets plus different eyes gives you happy, crying, angry, sleepy or confused. That modularity is exactly why there are so many variations, and why kaomoji lend themselves to being browsed by mood, action or character type.

Common building blocks

• Eyes: ◕ ◕, •́ •̀, ╥ ╥, ◉ ◉, ಠ ಠ, ⌒ ⌒, T T, > <
• Mouths: ‿, ω, □, 皿, ▽, 益, 〰
• Cheeks / blush: ｡, ⁎, ✿, *
• Hands / arms: ヽ, ノ, ╯, ╰, ╭, ʕ, ʔ
• Tears / sweat / effects: ;, T_T, ˃̣̣̥, つ, ~~, ♡, ★

Once you know these parts, you can read any kaomoji at a glance and even remix your own. That is the real reward of browsing a kaomoji library: you stop copying and start composing.

Why people still use kaomoji in 2026

• Cross-platform reliability — kaomoji render identically on any device with a basic Unicode font, from ancient IRC clients to modern Slack. No missing-glyph box, no platform-specific yellow face.
• Tone and irony — a shrug or a flipped table carries a specific kind of deadpan humour that a full-colour emoji cannot match. Kaomoji are theatrical without being flashy.
• Expressive range — there are literally thousands of kaomoji for micro-emotions no single emoji covers: sleepy-but-content, politely panicking, happily nosebleeding, smug bear peeking from a bush, magical-girl-transformation excitement.
• Accessibility — screen readers read each Unicode code point, which means a kaomoji is announced character by character — sometimes lovingly, sometimes hilariously. Emoji are usually announced by one pre-defined name.
• Community identity — kaomoji are a badge of a specific online culture (imageboards, speedrun chats, programmer forums, anime fandom, vtuber chats). Using one is a small cultural handshake.

How to use kaomoji — quick guide

1. Click any kaomoji on this site to copy it to your clipboard — no sign-up, no app.
2. Paste it anywhere that accepts text: Slack, Discord, Twitter/X, Instagram captions, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS, email, Notion, Figma, Obsidian, a Twitch chat, a commit message, even a <code>&lt;title&gt;</code> tag.
3. On mobile, long-press the copied text to paste — some apps need a second tap to flatten formatting.
4. In macOS, add your favourites to System Settings → Keyboard → Text Replacements (e.g. "shr" → ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). Windows users can use PowerToys Keyboard Manager or AutoHotKey.
5. Avoid double-escaping: if a chat app converts smart quotes or backslashes, the kaomoji can break. Pasting into a code fence (wrap with `backticks`) usually preserves it.

Kaomoji categories on this site

We group 962 kaomoji into six top-level families so you can find the right face fast:

• Positive Kaomoji — joy kaomoji, love kaomoji, embarrassment kaomoji, sympathy kaomoji, laughing kaomoji, blushing kaomoji, kissing kaomoji — smiles, blushes, hearts, bows.
• Negative Kaomoji — anger kaomoji, sadness kaomoji, pain kaomoji, fear kaomoji, dissatisfaction kaomoji, crying kaomoji, annoyed kaomoji — tears, rage lines, defensive hands.
• Neutral Kaomoji — indifference kaomoji, confusion kaomoji, doubt kaomoji, surprise kaomoji, thinking kaomoji — flat mouths, ???, side-eye, raised brows.
• Actions Kaomoji — greeting kaomoji, hugging kaomoji, winking kaomoji, apologizing kaomoji, writing kaomoji, running kaomoji, sleeping kaomoji, nosebleeding kaomoji, hiding kaomoji, shrug kaomoji, table flip kaomoji, facepalm kaomoji — kaomoji that actually do something.
• Animals Kaomoji — bear kaomoji, cat kaomoji, dog kaomoji, rabbit kaomoji, pig kaomoji, bird kaomoji, spider kaomoji, fish kaomoji, hamster kaomoji, seal kaomoji, snake kaomoji, butterfly kaomoji, bat kaomoji — the ASCII menagerie.
• Other Kaomoji — friends kaomoji, enemies kaomoji, magic kaomoji, food kaomoji, music kaomoji, games kaomoji, faces kaomoji, special kaomoji, sparkles kaomoji, stars kaomoji, hearts & symbols kaomoji, flowers kaomoji, weather kaomoji — special characters that do not fit the other boxes.

Every kaomoji has its own page with copy-paste, a description, related keywords, and a grid of similar kaomoji from the same group, so discovery keeps going.

Famous kaomoji you probably already know

• ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ — the shrug. A 2010s icon; Slack auto-suggests it; popularised by Kanye West and then by literally everyone.
• (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ — the table flip. One of the most animated kaomoji ever made — peak 2channel energy.
• ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ — the bear. The mascot of Go-lang developers and the Tsum Tsum aesthetic.
• (｡◕‿◕｡) — the classic sparkly smile. Perfect for "thanks!" and "yay!" messages.
• (ಠ_ಠ) — "look of disapproval". The Lenny of 2010s image-macro culture.
• ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) — Lenny Face. Not strictly Japanese-origin, but adopted into the kaomoji family. Use sparingly.
• (*/ω＼*) — embarrassed / hiding face. Anime-coded.

Kaomoji on different platforms

Kaomoji are just Unicode text, so they work everywhere plain text works. A few platform notes:

• Slack / Discord — kaomoji paste fine. Discord strips some diacritics in code blocks; use inline instead. Slack has a built-in shrug command: /shrug your message.
• Twitter / X — full support including combining diacritics. Long kaomoji with many combining marks still count as only a few characters, which is useful for the 280-character limit.
• iOS / macOS — native text replacement lets you type a short code and have it expanded into your favourite kaomoji.
• Windows — Windows 10+ has a built-in kaomoji keyboard at Win + . (period). It ships hundreds of kaomoji out of the box.
• Android — Gboard has a dedicated ASCII tab; Samsung Keyboard exposes kaomoji under the emoji menu.
• Terminals / CLI — any terminal with a font that supports basic katakana and extended Latin will render most kaomoji. Some extremely elaborate kaomoji with stacked combining marks may render raggedly in monospaced fonts.

Culture, communities and kaomoji lore

Kaomoji are a living part of internet folk culture. On the Japanese side: 2channel's ASCII-art boards, Nico Nico Douga comment streams, and the enormous kaomoji dictionaries hosted on personal homepages in the late 2000s. On the Western side: early LiveJournal + DeviantArt communities, the 2010s Tumblr cutesy era, MMO guild chats where kaomoji served as quick emotional reactions, and more recently the vtuber scene, where kaomoji pair naturally with the anime-coded communication style.

Interestingly, some kaomoji have travelled in the other direction: the shrug ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ was popularised in English and is now often found in Japanese chat too. Kaomoji are a two-way bridge between cultures.

Kaomoji FAQ