Crying Kaomoji

A tear is a character, and there are three places to put it

What separates a crying kaomoji from a merely sad one is not the mood of the eyes but the presence of a character the dry face would not need. There are three ways of writing that character, and once you can see them you can build or read almost any crying face.

Inside the eye: the semicolon

The most economical of the three, because one character does both jobs at once. A semicolon is a dot with a comma hanging off it — an eye with a drop already leaving it. Both widths appear above: the half-width ; gives (;_;), and the full-width ； gives (；ω；), which sits wider and reads as more deliberate. (:_;) is worth noticing: a colon on one side and a semicolon on the other, so only one eye has started.

Streaming down: the vertical stroke

Here the character is chosen for having a lid on top and a line running down from it. Ｔ is the obvious one, and (T_T) uses it as plainly as it can be used. ╥, from the box-drawing block, has a doubled stem, which reads as two tracks rather than one. ಥ, a Kannada letter, and ｉ at full width both work for the same structural reason: something round at the top, something falling underneath.

Outside the face: flung droplets

The only one of the three that writes outside the brackets. ｡ and ﾟ — a half-width full stop and a half-width semi-voiced sound mark — get placed outside the brackets, mirrored left and right, as tears thrown clear of the face: ｡ﾟ(ﾟ´ω｀ﾟ)ﾟ｡. The mirroring matters. The sequence runs small-to-large going inward on the left and large-to-small going outward on the right, so the spray looks symmetric. Get the order wrong and the face lists to one side.

Hands, sleeves and the unclosed bracket

Crying faces borrow gesture as well as expression. ﾉ and ヽ come up as hands over the eyes, つ and ⊂ as a sleeve dragged across the face. In (´Д⊂ヽ nothing closes the bracket: ⊂, the arm, occupies the position the closing bracket would take, and ヽ trails past it.

Two faces above reach into Hangul for the same shape: ㅠ and ㅜ carry the same downward strokes as Ｔ and ╥, so they sit in the streaming-eye position. Faces with the same brows but no tear belong on the sad page; the squeezed ＞＜ eyes here are the same ones used for laughing on the happy page, which is exactly why the tear characters have to do so much work. The semicolon has a second job as well: moved out of the eye to the edge of the face, the same character reads as sweat rather than a tear, which is the subject of 汗の顔文字 — position, not the character, decides whether a face is upset or merely flustered. If you are matching a face to a Japanese message, 涙の顔文字 groups crying faces by the character doing the crying, exactly as this page does, but labels each one in Japanese. The kaomoji index has the rest.