Text faces and kaomoji

What kaomoji are

Kaomoji are faces drawn with ordinary characters, and the word says exactly that: 顔 (kao, face) plus 文字 (moji, character). The defining feature is orientation. Western emoticons such as :-) are written sideways and require the reader to tilt their head to resolve the colon into a pair of eyes. Kaomoji are upright — (＾▽＾) reads straight on, with brackets for the outline of the face and the characters between them for eyes and mouth.

That difference is not cosmetic, and the reasons behind it are worth knowing. Japanese encodings offered a far larger palette of characters than the ASCII available to early Western users, so there was no need to improvise with punctuation alone: katakana, Hangul, brackets of several widths and a wealth of symbols were all available for eyes, hands and hair. Upright faces also carry more nuance than sideways ones, because the eyes do the work rather than the mouth — a cultural observation borne out by research showing Japanese readers weight the eyes more heavily than Western readers when judging expression. The result is a vocabulary that can distinguish embarrassment from shyness from nervousness, where a sideways emoticon set has roughly three states.

The history of text faces

The sideways emoticon has a precisely documented birth. On 19 September 1982, Scott Fahlman proposed :-) and :-( on a Carnegie Mellon University bulletin board as markers for posts that were and were not jokes, after a thread about a mercury spill had been misread as serious. The original message was recovered from backup tapes years later and is still online.

The upright Japanese style is usually dated to 1986 on ASCII NET, an early Japanese online service, where (^_^) is commonly credited to the user Yasushi Wakabayashi. Through the 1990s and 2000s the form expanded enormously on Japanese message boards, above all 2channel, whose users built an entire culture of Shift-JIS art and recurring character faces — the best known being Mona, a cat-like figure drawn entirely in text. Many of the arm and hand motifs in modern kaomoji, the ノ and ヽ and つ, descend from that period.

Individual faces have their own histories. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ builds its blank expression from the katakana ツ (tsu) and became a staple of Western internet writing in the 2010s. The Lenny face, ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°), surfaced around 2012 on the Finnish imageboard Ylilauta and owes its raised eyebrows to a combining character, U+0361, stacked above the eyes. ಠ_ಠ, the disapproval look, takes its eyes from the Kannada letter ṭha — a script used in southern India, pressed into service purely because the glyph resembles a narrowed eye. Emoji, by contrast, arrived from a different direction entirely: Shigetaka Kurita's 1999 set for NTT DoCoMo's i-mode, which became Unicode characters in 2010 and largely displaced kaomoji in casual messaging without ever replacing their expressive range.

Where text faces break

A kaomoji is only as portable as the rarest character in it, and four things commonly go wrong. Missing glyphs: because these faces borrow from Japanese, Korean, Kannada, Cherokee and Canadian Aboriginal syllabics among others, no single font covers them all, and a system without the right font substitutes an empty box. Combining marks: faces that stack accents over characters, the Lenny face included, depend on the renderer positioning them correctly, and older software often misaligns them. Escaping: the backslash in the shrug is treated as an escape character by some chat clients and markdown parsers, which silently eat it and leave the shrug one-armed — doubling it to ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ is the usual workaround. Length limits: a long face is a lot of characters, which matters against a strict cap.

If a face must survive anywhere, pick one built from plain brackets and punctuation. The elaborate ones are best kept for places you control, such as your own posts and documents, rather than usernames, filenames or anything a machine will parse.

Using text faces well

The practical value of a kaomoji is tone. Written text strips out the face and voice that would normally carry intent, which is precisely the problem Fahlman's smiley was invented to solve, and a face at the end of a sentence tells the reader how to hear it. That works best sparingly: one well-chosen face reads as warmth, while three in a row reads as noise, and a face attached to a serious message tends to undercut it.

For neighbouring jobs, the special characters & symbols page covers the individual arrows, stars and accents these faces are assembled from, the fancy text generator converts whole words into styled Unicode lettering for bios, and the invisible character tool provides the blank characters used to space faces apart or create empty lines around them. Before posting against a strict limit, the character counter will tell you what a face actually costs you.

Frequently asked questions