Excited Kaomoji
Excited kaomoji raise the arms outside the parentheses while the face inside stays simple. Copy any face below; the note under each one says which characters do the work.
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The excitement is in the arms, not the face
A Western emoticon stops at the head. A kaomoji does not: the parentheses are the face, and everything outside them is the rest of the body. That is why (・∀・) reads as merely pleased while ヽ(・∀・)ﾉ reads as excited. The face has not changed at all — only the arms have gone up. The same faces without the arms are gathered on the happy kaomoji page, and reading the two sets side by side shows how much of the feeling the arms are carrying.
The default pair of arms is ヽ and ﾉ. The first is the katakana iteration mark, the second is a half-width katakana NO, and they work as a pair because their strokes lean opposite ways. Neither is a mirror of the other, but together they look symmetrical enough at small sizes.
Other arms, and what they change
＼and／, the fullwidth reverse solidus and solidus, are straighter and wider. The arms read as fully extended rather than waving.- A single
ﾉused twice, as in(ﾉ´∀｀)ﾉ, puts one arm in front of the face and one behind it, which reads as movement rather than a held pose. - A lowercase
oon each side is not an arm at all. It is a fist held in at the ribs, soo(≧▽≦)ois contained excitement rather than broadcast excitement. ٩and۶are an Arabic-Indic digit nine and an extended Arabic-Indic digit six. Nothing about them is Japanese; they were adopted because they curl like a bent elbow.୧and૭, an Oriya one and a Gujarati seven, do the same job with a sharper joint.
Eyes and mouths
Inside the parentheses the excited set is narrow. ≧ and ≦ squeeze the eyes shut, which is how the form shows joy strong enough to close the eyes. ☆ and ★ replace the eyes entirely for the star-struck reading; the star kaomoji page has the rest of that family and the differences between the individual star characters. ◎ and ° keep them open, which pushes the face towards surprise instead of delight.
Mouths run from quiet to loud in a fairly fixed order: ∀ is a grin with teeth showing, ▽ and ∇ are open, 〇 and o are round and sustained, Д (a Cyrillic capital de) is a shout, and □ is the widest of the lot.
Stretching the shout
キタ━━━(ﾟ∀ﾟ)━━━!! carries a fixed piece of wording rather than only a fixed shape. キタ means “it came”. The bars on either side are a run of the box-drawings heavy horizontal character repeated, not one long glyph, so the length is free: people stretch or shorten the run to set the volume while the face in the middle stays exactly the same.
Where it breaks
Half-width katakana such as ﾉ and ﾟ are drawn at roughly half the width of the fullwidth forms ノ and ゜. In a proportional font that difference is what makes the arms sit close to the shoulders. In a monospace font every character is given one cell regardless of its drawn width, so the arms drift outwards and the face looks loose. If a face that looked right in a chat window looks wrong in a code block, that is almost always the reason.
Every character on this page is inside the Basic Multilingual Plane, so none of it is at risk from systems that store only three-byte characters and quietly drop colour emoji. Related sets are indexed at the kaomoji hub, and if you are aiming these at one particular app, the copy-and-paste notes cover which fields keep a face intact and which flatten it. Excitement pointed at something that has not happened yet has its own set in Japanese — the wakuwaku faces reuse these eyes and mouths but wrap the body in doubled and tripled brackets so it shakes.