Kaomoji

An upright face

Kaomoji are faces built from text, and the defining feature is orientation. A Western emoticon like :-) is read sideways. A kaomoji such as (◕‿◕) is read as written, with eyes, mouth and cheeks visible without tilting your head. The word itself is Japanese: 顔 (kao) means face and 文字 (moji) means character. They grew out of Japanese online communities in the 1980s, according to commonly cited accounts, and became common in Japanese chat and message boards before spreading worldwide.

Why they developed this way partly comes down to the writing system. Japanese input already gave users access to hundreds of symbols, punctuation marks and letters, so building a face from more than a nose and a mouth was natural. The result is a richer vocabulary: a different character for each eye, cheeks, blush marks, arms and decorations.

How a kaomoji is assembled

Most kaomoji follow a frame: brackets for the face outline, symbols for the eyes, a character for the mouth, and optional extras outside the brackets. In (◕‿◕), the brackets are ordinary parentheses, the eyes are ◕ (CIRCLE WITH ALL BUT UPPER LEFT QUADRANT BLACK) and the mouth is ‿ (UNDERTIE). In ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ, the “ears” are two glottal-stop letters from phonetics, ʕ and ʔ, and the nose and mouth is ᴥ (LATIN LETTER AIN). Taken apart, the face is mostly borrowed letters.

That borrowing is the source of most compatibility problems. Each piece comes from a different Unicode block, and each needs a font that has it.

Combining marks inside faces

Some faces use combining characters. The sad face (｡•́︿•̀｡) places an acute and a grave accent over the dot eyes to make them tilt. These accents are combining marks, and each is a separate code point that attaches to the character before it. In some apps the accents drift or are dropped, and the face loses its expression. If you see a face with floating marks, replace it with a version that has plain eyes, such as (｡•︿•｡). This is the same issue described for the lenny face.

Fullwidth and halfwidth

Many kaomoji mix full-width and half-width forms of the same punctuation. （＾▽＾） with fullwidth brackets is wider than (^▽^) with ordinary ones. Fullwidth characters take up the width of two Latin letters in most fonts. Mixing them can make a face look unbalanced if one eye is fullwidth and the other is not. Copy the whole face, rather than rebuilding it, and it will be balanced as designed.

Choosing a kaomoji

Short ones are the most reliable. A face with five or six common characters survives nearly every app. Long ones with decorations on both sides, flowers or sparkles around the face, depend on more characters and are more likely to wrap. Animal faces are fun, but some use rare characters such as the Thai ฅ, which a font may lack.

On tone, kaomoji have a cuter and softer reputation than Western emoticons. They are widely used in gaming and fandom communities, and less in formal writing.

Typing and shortcuts

1. Copy and paste. Tap a face above.
2. Text replacement. On iPhone, iPad and Mac, add a text replacement in keyboard settings. On Android, keyboard apps offer shortcuts, and on Windows a text expander does the same.
3. Japanese input methods. On Windows and macOS with a Japanese keyboard, typing the word for a feeling, for example うれしい for happy, often offers kaomoji among the candidates.
4. Keyboard apps. Some phone keyboards have a built-in kaomoji tab.

Accessibility

A screen reader may read every character of a kaomoji, including names such as “circle with all but upper left quadrant black”. Some skip rare marks. It is almost never a clear spoken message. Put the plain message first, add one face, and avoid strings of faces. The fancy text accessibility guide explains why decoration produces noisy audio. For limits that count each of these characters, see character limits.

Related pages

The text faces hub compares the main types. The shrug and table flip pages cover two well-known faces with their own quirks, and cute symbols has marks to decorate around a face.