Kaomoji
Kaomoji are Japanese emoticons built to be read upright rather than sideways. Every face below is plain text and can be pasted anywhere text goes; each is listed with the characters that make it.
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Every page in this section
- Lenny FaceFaces that genuinely read as Lenny Face, each with what it is made of
- Shrug EmoticonFaces that genuinely read as Shrug Emoticon, each with what it is made of
- Kaomoji Copy and PasteFaces that genuinely read as Kaomoji Copy and Paste, each with what it is made of
- Cute KaomojiFaces that genuinely read as Cute Kaomoji, each with what it is made of
- Table FlipFaces that genuinely read as Table Flip, each with what it is made of
- Text FacesFaces that genuinely read as Text Faces, each with what it is made of
- Happy KaomojiFaces that genuinely read as Happy Kaomoji, each with what it is made of
- Heart KaomojiFaces that genuinely read as Heart Kaomoji, each with what it is made of
- Cat KaomojiFaces that genuinely read as Cat Kaomoji, each with what it is made of
- Sad KaomojiFaces that genuinely read as Sad Kaomoji, each with what it is made of
- Crying KaomojiFaces that genuinely read as Crying Kaomoji, each with what it is made of
- Copy and Paste Text ArtFaces that genuinely read as Copy and Paste Text Art, each with what it is made of
- Star KaomojiFaces that genuinely read as Star Kaomoji, each with what it is made of
- Bunny KaomojiFaces that genuinely read as Bunny Kaomoji, each with what it is made of
- ASCII EmoticonsFaces that genuinely read as ASCII Emoticons, each with what it is made of
- Blushing KaomojiFaces that genuinely read as Blushing Kaomoji, each with what it is made of
- Sparkle KaomojiFaces that genuinely read as Sparkle Kaomoji, each with what it is made of
- Flower KaomojiFaces that genuinely read as Flower Kaomoji, each with what it is made of
- Angry KaomojiFaces that genuinely read as Angry Kaomoji, each with what it is made of
- Excited KaomojiFaces that genuinely read as Excited Kaomoji, each with what it is made of
- Bear KaomojiFaces that genuinely read as Bear Kaomoji, each with what it is made of
- Sleepy KaomojiFaces that genuinely read as Sleepy Kaomoji, each with what it is made of
- Confused KaomojiFaces that genuinely read as Confused Kaomoji, each with what it is made of
What the word means
顔文字 is written with the character for face followed by the two characters for written character, and that is exactly what a kaomoji is: a face spelled out in letters. The convention is that you read it head-on. (´･ω･`) is already looking at you — the parentheses are the sides of the head, and the eyes, mouth and eyebrows sit in the positions they occupy on a face.
The Western style is the other tradition. :-) is rotated ninety degrees, so the colon is a pair of eyes only after you tilt your head, and the whole expression hangs on the final character. The two systems put the emotional load in different places. Sideways, it is the mouth that changes. Upright, it is the eyes.
The eyes do the work
Compare a column of faces that share one mouth. (^_^), (T_T), (>_<), (¬_¬) and (=_=) all have a plain low line between the eyes, and they read as pleased, weeping, wincing, unconvinced and worn out. Nothing changed except the two characters on either side. This is why a kaomoji catalogue is really a catalogue of eye shapes, and why the mouth is often left as a bare underscore for pages at a time.
Where the characters come from
Kaomoji raid whatever scripts are reachable from a Japanese input method or a Unicode picker. The parts get chosen for silhouette alone, with no regard for what they were encoded to represent:
- Kana —
ノandづas arms,ヽandヾ(the katakana iteration marks) as a raised pair,へas a sulking mouth. - Punctuation and maths —
∀as a grin,⌒as a laughing eye,‿as a smile,＾as an eyebrow. - Box-drawing —
╯and╮as shoulders and arms,┻━┻as furniture. - Letters from unrelated scripts — Kannada
ಠandಥ, Thaiงand๑, Georgianლ, Hangulㅂ, Canadian Syllabicsᕦandᕤ, all used as eyes, fists and limbs.
Halfwidth katakana — ﾉ, ﾟ, ･ — is not a degraded form here but a deliberate one. A halfwidth glyph takes up half the space of a fullwidth one, so it slots into a face without pushing the rest of it apart.
The frame, and everything outside it
Nearly every face here obeys a simple rule: the parentheses are the head, and anything to the left or right of them is body. ヽ(・∀・)ﾉ is the same head as (・∀・) with two arms attached. m(_ _)m is a bowed head with a hand on either side of it. Once the frame is fixed, a face can be modified indefinitely without being redrawn — add a * outside each eye for a blush, a ; for sweat, a ＃ above for anger.
From here the collection splits by mood and gesture: cute kaomoji for the soft end of the range, and three faces that each carry a page of their own — the shrug, the table flip, and the Lenny face, whose eyebrows are double diacritics arcing over the spaces beside them, which is why those spaces cannot be deleted. If you want the wider family that includes sideways Western emoticons as well, start at text faces. The Japanese-language directory is at かわいい顔文字.