Cat Symbols

There is no text cat in Unicode

Unicode contains a family of cat emoji, such as 🐱 (CAT FACE), 🐈 (CAT), 🐾 (PAW PRINTS) and a set of cat-face reactions such as 😸 (GRINNING CAT FACE WITH SMILING EYES), 😻 (SMILING CAT FACE WITH HEART-SHAPED EYES), 😼 (CAT FACE WITH WRY SMILE) and 🙀 (WEARY CAT FACE). All of them are emoji. None has a monochrome text version that follows your font and colour, and every platform draws them in its own art. The 🐱 on iPhone, Android and Windows are three different drawings.

If you want a cat in plain text, you build one. This is the tradition behind kaomoji, Japanese for “face characters”: expressions made from letters and symbols. Cat kaomoji are among the most common, because a cat’s face reduces well to ears, whiskers and a mouth.

How the cats are built

The simplest cat is =^..^= : equals signs for whiskers, carets for ears, dots for the nose and mouth. It uses only ASCII characters, so it works anywhere. It is the safe option when you cannot test the reader’s device.

The more detailed ones borrow from other scripts. In ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ, the outer ฅ is THAI CHARACTER KHO KHON, whose curved top looks like a raised paw. The middle ﻌ is ARABIC LETTER AIN MEDIAL FORM, which looks like a small nose and mouth. The carets and bullets are ordinary punctuation. In ᓚᘏᗢ, all three pieces are Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, drawn to look like a cat with a tail, walking. ≽^•⩊•^≼ uses mathematical relation symbols for ears and a union operator for a mouth.

That is why the multi-character items in the second group have plain labels rather than Unicode names: there is no official name for a face, only for its pieces. The pieces appear in the third group so you can mix your own.

Why cats break

A kaomoji is only as strong as its weakest piece. If one character is missing from the reader’s font, the device substitutes a box or a different-looking letter, and the cat is damaged. The rare pieces here are the Thai and Arabic letters, the syllabics and the mathematical operators. Current iPhones, Android phones and Windows have good coverage, but older devices and embedded browsers may not. Plain ASCII cats avoid the risk entirely, at the cost of simplicity.

The black cat sequence

🐈‍⬛ (the black cat) is not a single character. It is a ZWJ sequence: 🐈 (CAT), a zero width joiner (U+200D) and ⬛ (BLACK LARGE SQUARE), which supporting systems merge into one black cat picture. On systems that do not support it, you see a cat followed by a black square. It counts as three code points, which matters in fields with a character limit. The character limits guide explains how emoji sequences are counted.

Text and emoji presentation

The emoji cats have no text form, so you cannot ask for a text version. The text pieces in the second and third groups have no emoji form either, with one exception: if you place one of the small hearts or ☁ beside a cat, it may turn into an emoji. A face made entirely of pieces stays in your text colour on every platform that has the glyphs. If you want a cat in a colour that matches your bio text, a kaomoji is the only option.

Cats in bios, names and captions

Cat faces appear in bios, comment sections and chat. Rules for what a name or bio field accepts vary by platform and change over time, and we have not tested every field. Emoji are generally accepted; rare script pieces are more variable. Check the result after saving, and look at a second device. The cute symbols page covers other kaomoji, and the cute fonts generator makes cute lettering from your own words.

How to type a cat

1. Emoji. On Windows, press the Windows key and the period key, then search “cat”. On Mac, press Control, Command and Space. On phones, use the emoji keyboard search.
2. Plain cats. Typing the pieces by hand is not practical. Copy a ready-made face, or create a text replacement: on iPhone, Settings, General, Keyboard, Text Replacement; on Mac, System Settings, Keyboard, Text Replacements. Map a short code like “meow” to ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ.
3. ASCII cat. =^..^= can be typed on any keyboard.
4. Word on Windows. For single pieces, type the code point and press Alt then X: 0E05 gives ฅ.
5. Alt codes. There are none for cats or their pieces.

Accessibility

Emoji cats are read by name, such as “cat face” or “paw prints”. Kaomoji are read as their pieces, so ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ may be spoken as “Thai character kho khon, circumflex accent, bullet, Arabic letter ain medial form…” and so on, which is long and meaningless. Use a kaomoji at the very end of a message and keep the meaning in words. A single paw print emoji is far shorter to hear than a kaomoji. The fancy text accessibility guide explains how screen readers treat unusual characters.

Related pages

Butterfly symbols uses the same letter-borrowing trick, and heart symbols has the hearts that often accompany a cat.