Kaomoji Copy and Paste (Japanese Emoticons)

What a kaomoji is, and why typing one by hand fails

A kaomoji is a face built out of ordinary text characters and read the right way up. The Western emoticon :-) asks you to tilt your head. A kaomoji does not, because the eyes carry the expression: (◕‿◕) is happy, (T_T) is crying, ಠ_ಠ disapproves. Japanese online communities have been assembling them since the 1980s, and the habit spread to every place where people type.

Typing one yourself is where it falls apart. A single face pulls characters from half a dozen Unicode blocks at once. The shrug needs a macron from the Latin-1 block, a katakana tsu from the Japanese block and a backslash. (´・ω・`) needs a Greek omega for the mouth and a Japanese middle dot for each eye. The table flip (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ is drawn with box-drawing characters that exist because old terminals needed to draw borders. No keyboard layout carries all of them, and no autocorrect will guess them. Copying a finished face is the only practical route, which is what the picker above is for: choose a mood, click a face, paste it.

Which face for which job

• Giving up, not caring: the shrug. The lenny variant adds a leer to the same gesture.
• Mock rage: the table flip (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻, in the Angry group.
• Innuendo: lenny ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°). The eyebrows are combining marks, so this is the face most likely to break in a name field.
• Soft and friendly: the bear ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ and the cat (=^･ω･^=), both in the Animals group.
• Plain and safe: (◕‿◕) and ヽ(´▽`)/ use common characters and survive almost anywhere.
• Sad: (T_T) is pure ASCII and the crying face least likely to turn into boxes. (╥﹏╥) looks better but needs more font coverage.
• Flat disapproval: ಠ_ಠ, a Kannada letter used as a pair of hard stares.

How to post the shrug on Reddit without losing an arm

Reddit’s markdown editor reads a backslash as an escape character and a pair of underscores as italics. Paste the shrug in raw and the backslash arm disappears, because the editor takes it as an instruction to print the underscore that follows. Escape the characters yourself instead:

1. Copy the shrug from the Shrug group above.
2. Paste it into the comment box.
3. If the box is in markdown mode, change the text to ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯: a doubled backslash for the arm, and a backslash in front of each underscore.
4. Check the preview. You should see the arm back and no italics.

If your comment box is the rich text editor rather than markdown, paste normally and read the preview before posting. Only the markdown editor applies those rules.

How to put a kaomoji in an Instagram bio

1. Click a face above to copy it.
2. Open Instagram, go to your profile and tap Edit profile.
3. Tap into the Bio field, place the cursor, press and hold, then tap Paste.
4. Save, then view your own profile as a visitor would and check that nothing turned into an empty box.

The bio field holds 150 characters and a decorated face can cost ten to fifteen of them, so budget for it. The display name accepts faces as well. The @username does not.

How to copy and paste on a phone or computer

• iPhone and iPad: tap a face to copy it, then press and hold in the target field and tap Paste. For a face you use daily, add it under Settings, General, Keyboard, Text Replacement and type a short phrase instead.
• Android: tap to copy, then press and hold in the field and choose Paste. Gboard keeps a clipboard tab behind the clipboard icon on its toolbar, which holds your recent copies.
• Windows: Ctrl+V pastes. The Windows key plus V opens the clipboard history, so you can keep several faces ready at once.
• Mac: Cmd+V pastes. Text Replacements in Keyboard settings does the same job as the iPhone shortcut and syncs across devices signed in to the same iCloud account.

This page also remembers the last twelve faces you copied and shows them in a Recently used row. That list is stored in your browser on this device only.

Where kaomoji work and where they break

• Discord: keeps every character exactly as copied. The message box also runs markdown, so a face carrying two underscores or two asterisks can come out italic or bold. Wrap it in backticks, or put a backslash in front of each underscore.
• X: characters survive, but the 280-character count is weighted by character range and most kaomoji characters fall in the ranges that count as two.
• Reddit: the markdown editor rewrites backslashes and underscores, as described above. The rich text editor leaves the text alone.
• Instagram and TikTok: captions, comments, bios and display names all accept them. The @handle allows only letters, digits, periods and underscores, so no face fits there.
• WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, Slack: the text passes through as typed. Slack and Telegram also format underscores and asterisks, so read the preview before sending a face that contains them.
• Games: the chat box usually accepts a kaomoji; the name field usually runs its own filter and often rejects one. A name that is accepted can still render as boxes if the game font does not cover the characters. Try a face in chat before spending a rename.
• Terminals, legacy email clients, single-byte encodings: expect boxes. A kaomoji needs full Unicode support; on a legacy regional encoding most of these characters do not exist at all.

Things to watch out for

Three cautions. Rendering: check a face on the kind of device your reader uses. One that looks perfect on your phone can be a row of empty boxes in an older email client, and you will never see it. Screen readers: assistive software reads a kaomoji character by character, so a bio made mostly of faces turns into noise. One face per message is kinder than a border of them. Tone: several of these carry meaning that the shape alone does not give away. Lenny reads as innuendo, ಠ_ಠ reads as disapproval, and the table flip reads as mock rage. In a work channel, a plain (◕‿◕) is the safe pick.