Shrug Emoji ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and Lenny Face ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

The shrug ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and the lenny face ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) are both built from ordinary text characters, which is why they work in every chat, comment box and game — and also why they break in a few surprising places. Tap any face below to copy it.

Shrug emoji ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The classic shrug is made of 11 characters: a macron ¯ for each shoulder, a backslash and an underscore for each arm, two parentheses for the head, and the Japanese katakana letter ツ (tsu) as the face. The ツ looks like two closed eyes and a smile, which gives the shrug its “oh well” mood.

What does the shrug mean?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ says “I don’t know”, “whatever” or “what can you do?” — mild helplessness, usually friendly. It spread widely in the early 2010s and is so common that Unicode added a real emoji for it in 2016: 🤷, “person shrugging”.

Why the shrug loses its arm

In Discord, Reddit, Slack and anywhere else that uses Markdown, the backslash is an escape character and underscores mean italics. If you type ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ there, the backslash disappears and the face turns into ¯_(ツ)_/¯ — one arm missing, sometimes with the middle in italics. The fix is to escape the backslash and the underscores yourself:

• Type ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ in Markdown apps — three backslashes before the first underscore and one before the second.
• In Discord you can simply type /shrug — Discord adds a correctly escaped ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ to your message.
• Or put the shrug inside backticks, which shows it in a code style but keeps every character.

Lenny face ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

The lenny face uses combining marks — tiny characters that sit on top of the one before them. The eyebrows are the combining double inverted breve (U+0361) placed over a space, the eyes are degree signs °, the nose is the combining double breve below (U+035C), and the mouth is the Latin letter ʖ (U+0296). That is why the face can look slightly different from one font to another.

What does the lenny face mean?

It is a cheeky, suggestive smirk — the face you make after a double meaning. It spread through forums and gaming chats around 2012 and became a meme of its own, with “lenny armies” and dozens of variations. Use it with friends; in a work chat it can read as flirty or sarcastic.

Other famous text faces

• Table flip (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ — rage; ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ) puts the table back.
• Look of disapproval ಠ_ಠ — the eyes are the Kannada letter ಠ.
• Happy dance ヽ(・∀・)ﾉ and excited (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧.
• Bear ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ and cat (=^･ω･^=).
• Crying (╥﹏╥) and hug (づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ.

More than a hundred others, sorted by mood, are on the kaomoji page.

How to type the shrug without copying it

• On iPhone add a text replacement: Settings → General → Keyboard → Text Replacement, shortcut “shrug” → ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. On a Mac it is in System Settings → Keyboard.
• On Android with Gboard, save it in the personal dictionary with a shortcut.
• On Windows, Win + . opens a Kaomoji tab with a shrug and many other faces.
• The 🤷 emoji is on every emoji keyboard under “shrug”.

Shrug, lenny and tone

Text faces soften a message the way a facial expression does in person. A shrug after “no idea when the bus comes” keeps it light; a lenny face after an innocent sentence turns it into a joke. Because they are text, they also survive places where emoji do not show — old phones, game chats, terminals and usernames — which is part of why they never went out of fashion.

Kaomoji, emoticons and emoji: what is the difference?

The first widely known smiley made of text, :-), was proposed by computer scientist Scott Fahlman on a university message board in 1982, so that jokes could be told apart from serious posts. Western emoticons like :) ;) :( are read sideways. In Japan, text faces developed differently: they are read upright and put the emotion in the eyes, like (^_^) or (T_T). These became known as kaomoji. Emoji came later, in the late 1990s, as small pictures on Japanese mobile phones; today they are standard Unicode characters that every phone draws in colour.

The shrug and the lenny face are kaomoji in spirit: upright faces built from characters of many scripts. That mix is part of their charm — and part of why each one has a few variants that look better or worse depending on the font.

The characters behind famous faces

Using text faces on different platforms

• Discord and Reddit use Markdown: escape backslashes and underscores, or use /shrug on Discord.
• Twitch chat shows text faces as they are, and many streamers have chat commands that post a favourite face.
• Slack and Microsoft Teams may turn some character pairs into emoji; paste the face instead of typing it.
• Games usually allow simple faces like (^_^) in chat; faces with rare characters may be filtered out of names.

Make your own text face

Every kaomoji follows the same recipe: a pair of brackets for the face, two matching characters for the eyes and something small for the mouth. Swap the eyes to change the mood — ^ ^ happy, ; ; sad, ಠ ಠ unimpressed, ◕ ◕ cute — and add arms with \ / ノ ヽ or ╯ outside the brackets. Once you know the parts, you can build a face for any situation in a few seconds.

Shrug and lenny face in different languages

Text faces travel well because they do not depend on words. The shrug is understood almost everywhere; in Japanese chats you will see it next to classic kaomoji like ┐(￣ヘ￣)┌, which means the same thing. Korean users often use ㅋㅋ for laughter and ㅠㅠ for crying, which are built from Hangul letters in the same spirit as kaomoji. The lenny face is more of an English-language internet meme, and people outside gaming and forum culture may not know its cheeky meaning — another reason to keep it for friends.

Should you use the emoji 🤷 or the text shrug?

The 🤷 emoji is quicker on a phone and shows a person, with skin-tone and gender variants. The text shrug ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is longer but has more personality, works in places that do not show emoji (old game chats, terminals, some forms) and keeps the same look everywhere. Many people use the emoji in quick replies and the text version when they want the joke to land.

Text faces in work chats

In a team chat a shrug is usually fine: it softens a “no idea” or a “not my call” and nobody takes it badly. The lenny face is different — its meaning is suggestive, so in a work channel it can come across as flirty or sarcastic. If you want a light, friendly face for work, use a simple one like (^_^) or the 🙂 emoji. Save table flips and lenny armies for friends, gaming servers and group chats where everyone knows the joke.

Whatever you choose, one face per message is plenty. Text faces work like a tone of voice: a small touch changes how a message feels, but too many make it hard to read.

Want to try more faces? Every kaomoji on this site is one tap away from your clipboard, so you can test a few in a chat and keep the ones that match your style.