Skip to content

Add to your Home Screen

  1. Tap the Share button in Safari's toolbar.
  2. Scroll down and tap Add to Home Screen.
  3. Tap Add. The generator opens full-screen and works offline.

Cute Symbols

Tap a face or symbol to copy it. Single characters show their exact Unicode name; the kaomoji faces are strings with plain-word labels.

By Maya Chen, lettering designer and type educator · Checked by Jordan Hale · · How we review content

Kaomoji faces

Faces built from several characters. Labels are plain descriptions, not Unicode names. They depend on every character being in the reader's font.

Tiny hearts and sparkles

Small shapes to place at the end of a line. ☺ and ☻ are the original smiley characters.

Weather and sky

Soft shapes for cloud and dream themes. ☁ ☂ and ☃ often turn into colour emoji on phones.

Face parts

Pieces you can use to build a face of your own.

31 symbols on this page. Names are the official Unicode character names; "emoji" marks characters that often appear as colour pictures on phones.

Cute text is assembled, not installed

A tiny smiley in text can be one character or twenty. The two single-character smileys, ☺ (WHITE SMILING FACE) and ☻ (BLACK SMILING FACE), have existed since the IBM PC character set of the early 1980s and are still in Unicode. Anything more elaborate is a kaomoji, a Japanese term for “face characters”: expressions assembled from punctuation, letters from other scripts and symbols, designed to be read sideways like an emoticon but with much more detail.

This difference matters when you copy. A single symbol like ♡ has a name, a code point and predictable behaviour. A kaomoji like ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ is a string of five characters from three blocks, and any one missing from the reader’s font can break the whole face.

How a kaomoji is built

Take the bear ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ. The outer ʕ and ʔ are LATIN LETTER PHARYNGEAL VOICED FRICATIVE and LATIN LETTER GLOTTAL STOP, phonetic letters that stand for sounds in Arabic and other languages. The eyes are the ordinary bullet •, and the nose is ᴥ (LATIN LETTER AIN), a letter from Americanist phonetic notation whose shape happens to look like a snout. None of these were designed as face parts. Their value is purely visual, and a reader who knows phonetics sees a string of unrelated letters.

The same logic runs through the others. In (◕‿◕) the eyes are ◕ (CIRCLE WITH ALL BUT UPPER LEFT QUADRANT BLACK), a geometric shape with a highlight, and the smile is ‿ (UNDERTIE), a punctuation mark used in linguistics. In (=^･ω･^=) the whiskers are equals signs and carets, the eyes are halfwidth katakana middle dots, and the mouth is the Greek letter ω. The bunny at the end uses ᵔ and ᵕ, which are tiny modifier letters, as shut eyes and a mouth, with ა (GEORGIAN LETTER AN) forming the paw.

That is why each multi-character item above has a plain-words label, not a Unicode name. There is no official name for a face, only names for its pieces. The last group lists some of those pieces so you can build your own.

Hearts, sparkles and soft shapes

For cute text without faces, the usual set is short and soft. ♡ (WHITE HEART SUIT) is the default cute mark, and ♥ is its solid twin. ✧ and ⋆ add sparkle; ✿ and ❀ add a flower. Clouds ☁, umbrellas ☂, snowmen ☃ and the crescent moons ☾ ☽ belong to a gentle sky vocabulary. Three of those, ☁ ☃ and ☀, are drawn as colour emoji on many phones, so their appearance changes by device, which you may want or may not.

Text and emoji presentation

Characters such as ☺, ☁, ☂ and ☃ exist in two presentations: a text glyph that follows your font colour, and a colour emoji from the platform. Phones often choose emoji by default. The invisible variation selector U+FE0E after the character asks for text, and U+FE0F asks for emoji. Apps are free to ignore the request. The kaomoji faces, being made of text characters, always stay in your text colour; the one exception is when a piece such as ☺ is swapped for emoji.

Where cute symbols work

  • Bios and captions. Short kaomoji and small hearts are common. Platforms set their own rules, can change them, and we have not verified every field; check after saving. Our Instagram fonts and WhatsApp fonts pages record documented behaviour.
  • Chat and messages. Faces survive best in apps that use a modern Unicode font. A face with rare pieces may break in an older client.
  • Display names and game names. Many fields strip or reject symbols. Test before you commit.
  • Text-style pages. The cute fonts generator makes cute lettering from your own words if you want styled letters rather than symbols.

Typing them quickly

Typing a kaomoji by hand is impractical, so the usual method is a text replacement. On an iPhone, go to Settings, General, Keyboard, Text Replacement and add a phrase such as “bear” with ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ as the shortcut result. On a Mac, System Settings, Keyboard, Text Replacements does the same. Android keyboards such as Gboard have a dictionary or shortcut feature that works similarly.

For single characters, Alt codes exist only for the two smileys: hold Alt and type 1 for ☺ or 2 for ☻ on the numeric keypad with Num Lock on. They come from the DOS character set and do not work in every modern app. Alt+3 gives ♥. For others, use Word’s Alt+X with the code point, for example 2661 then Alt+X for ♡, or the Mac Character Viewer.

Accessibility

A kaomoji is read as its pieces. ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ may be spoken as “latin letter pharyngeal voiced fricative, bullet, latin letter ain, bullet, latin letter glottal stop”, which is long and meaningless to a listener. The same is true for (◕‿◕). Use faces sparingly, put them at the very end of a message, and do not rely on one to carry meaning. If you need to say a feeling, write the word. For the wider picture, the fancy text accessibility guide covers how screen readers treat unusual characters.

Cat symbols has more animal faces, bow symbols covers ribbons, and aesthetic symbols lists the dots and sparkles that often frame a face.

Frequently asked questions

What are kaomoji and how are they different from emoji?
Kaomoji are Japanese-style faces made from ordinary text characters, such as (◕‿◕). Emoji are single pictures drawn by the platform. Kaomoji are longer, stay in your text colour, and depend on fonts having every character. They are cross-platform in theory but can break into boxes if one piece is missing.
Why does my kaomoji look broken on another device?
Each piece, such as ʕ ʔ or ᴥ, comes from a different Unicode block, and not every font has all of them. The device then substitutes a box or a different-looking letter. Shorter faces with common characters such as (^_^) are more reliable. See the boxes guide.
Which cute symbols are smiley faces?
Two of them: ☺ (U+263A) is an outline smiling face and ☻ (U+263B) a solid one, both from the old DOS character set. ☺ also has an emoji form that phones may draw in yellow. For more faces, including frowns and text faces, see the smiley symbols page.
Do cute symbols work in usernames and bios?
Most single symbols are accepted in bios, but each platform sets and changes its own rules about names and characters. Test the result after saving. Our Instagram fonts page records what we have documented, and there are no verified rules for every game.
How do I type cute symbols quickly?
Set text replacements on your phone: a short code such as "bear" can expand to ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ every time you type it. On a Mac, use System Settings, Keyboard, Text Replacements. On iPhone, Settings, General, Keyboard, Text Replacement. Alt codes only cover ☺ and ☻ (Alt+1, Alt+2).

Related symbols and tools