Smiley Face Symbols
Tap a smiley to copy it. Some are old text characters, some are emoji, and the popular ツ is actually a Japanese letter.
By Maya Chen, lettering designer and type educator · Checked by Jordan Hale · · How we review content
Text smiley characters
Characters that Unicode defines as faces. Phones may draw them as emoji.
Emoji smileys
Colour faces that always ignore the text colour.
Letters used as smiles
These are not faces in Unicode. They are letters that look like a smile.
Typed smileys
Plain strings you can type with a keyboard. Labels are plain descriptions.
24 symbols on this page. Names are the official Unicode character names; "emoji" marks characters that often appear as colour pictures on phones.
Three ways to make a smile
Smiley faces reach the screen in three different ways, and they are not interchangeable. There are characters that Unicode names as faces, ☺ ☻ ☹. There are emoji faces such as 🙂 and 😀. And there are ordinary characters that people have borrowed because they look like a smile, such as ツ or the typed :). Which one you choose affects colour, accessibility and how reliably it displays.
The first group comes from the oldest layer of computer character sets. ☺ and ☻ sat at positions 1 and 2 of the original IBM PC character set, which is why Windows still types them with Alt+1 and Alt+2. Unicode later adopted them as WHITE SMILING FACE and BLACK SMILING FACE, and ☹ completed the set as WHITE FROWNING FACE. The “white” and “black” in their names refer to outline and solid, not to skin colour or mood.
Why ☺ sometimes turns into an emoji
☺ and ☹ are among the characters that exist in both a text and an emoji form. Android and iOS often show them as yellow emoji faces, while Windows desktop apps usually show a monochrome face that takes the text colour. A variation selector can request one style: U+FE0E for text and U+FE0F for emoji. Apps are free to ignore the request. ☻, the solid face, is not in the emoji set, so it stays a plain character and shows in black on most systems.
If you want a clean, text-coloured smile for a username or a printed design, ☻ is the safest, and ⌣ (SMILE, U+2323) is a minimal mouth only. ⌢ (FROWN) is its opposite. Combined with eyes they build faces by hand, as in ◕‿◕, where ◕ is a circle with a dark quadrant used as an eye and ‿ (UNDERTIE) is the mouth.
ツ is a letter, not a smiley
The most copied smiley on social media is not a face at all. ツ is the Japanese katakana letter “tsu” (KATAKANA LETTER TU in Unicode), and its two short strokes and a long curve happen to look like eyes and a mouth. English speakers adopted it as a smile, and it became the head of the shrug ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The smaller ッ is the sokuon, the letter that doubles a consonant in Japanese. ヅ and シ are different katakana, and シ (shi) is in fact a sad-looking one, so people use it for a frown.
That origin matters for two reasons. A screen reader or a translation tool will treat ツ as Japanese text, not as a smile, and a person who reads Japanese will see a letter in the middle of your sentence. In a name or a bio that is generally harmless, but in a message to someone who might read it aloud, use a word or a real emoji. Fonts also matter, because ツ needs a Japanese-capable font. Nearly all devices have one, but some embedded systems and older game clients do not, and you will see a box.
Typed smileys and their history
The sideways smile was proposed in a message on 19 September 1982 by Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon University, who suggested :-) for jokes and :-( for serious posts on an online bulletin board. The nose makes the face easier to read, and many people still type it. Omitting the nose, as in :), became the norm. The Japanese tradition of upright faces, called kaomoji, developed independently and is covered on the kaomoji page and the wider text faces hub.
Typed smileys are plain ASCII, so they work in any field that accepts text. The catch is that many apps convert them to emoji. Some also treat particular strings as formatting, for example a colon and a bracket can trigger an emoji picker in chat apps and in a few forum systems.
When to choose each kind
| Need | Best choice | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Plain-text colour, username | ☻ or ☺ | Follows text colour, 1 character |
| Message that can be read aloud | 🙂 or a word | Has a clear spoken name |
| Anywhere plain ASCII is required | :) | No special characters |
| Playful, Japanese-style look | ツ | Short, widely recognised |
How to type a smiley
- Windows Alt codes. On the numeric keypad, hold Alt and type 1 for ☺, 2 for ☻.
- Word. Type 263A and press Alt then X for ☺. Type 263B for ☻ and 2639 for ☹.
- Windows emoji panel. Press the Windows key and the period key and search for smile.
- Mac and phones. The Character Viewer (Control, Command, Space) and the emoji keyboard cover everything on this page except ツ, which needs a Japanese keyboard layout or copy and paste.
- iOS and macOS text replacement. Set a shortcut such as “smy” to expand to ☻.
Accessibility
Real emoji have standard spoken names, so they are the better choice when a message might be read by a screen reader. Typed smileys vary. Some readers say “colon right parenthesis”, some skip them. The Unicode smileys ☺ and ☻ are read by name and are fine in small numbers. Repeated smileys are tiring to hear, and ツ is read as a katakana letter. The fancy text accessibility guide explains how reading by name works. For hearts and other warm marks, see heart symbols and cute symbols.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between ☺ and ☻?
Why is ツ used as a smiley if it is a letter?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯. In Japanese it is just a letter. Some screen readers will announce it as a katakana letter, not a smile.How do I type a smiley face with the keyboard?
Are typed smileys like :) turned into emoji?
Do screen readers read smileys?
Related symbols and tools
- Heart SymbolsTap any heart to copy it. Each one shows its Unicode name and code point, so you know what you are pasting and how it may look on someone else's screen.
- Cute SymbolsTap a face or symbol to copy it. Single characters show their exact Unicode name; the kaomoji faces are strings with plain-word labels.
- Text Faces to Copy and PasteText faces are expressions drawn with keyboard and Unicode characters, from the Western emoticon :-) to the Japanese kaomoji (^_^) and meme faces such as the lenny face and the shrug. Pick a type below, tap to copy it, and paste it anywhere that accepts text.
- Aesthetic SymbolsTap a symbol to copy it. Aesthetic text is built from small borrowed characters, and each one below shows its true name so you know what it really is.
- Text Symbols to Copy and PasteText symbols are Unicode characters, such as hearts, stars, arrows, check marks and brackets, that you copy and paste into bios, names, messages and documents. Each one shows its Unicode name and code point, so you know exactly what you are pasting and can tell it apart from an emoji.
- Text DecoratorThis text decorator wraps your name in 28 frames such as ꧁ ꧂ and ★彡 彡★, in the letter style you choose. Type a name, filter frames by mood, then tap a row to copy.