Kaomoji

Sleepy Kaomoji

Thirty tired faces, ready to copy. A sleeping kaomoji barely has a face — the eyes shut down to one stroke and everything that says asleep happens outside the brackets.

Tap any tile to copy it. Nothing is sent anywhere — the copy happens in your browser.

Sleep is punctuation, not expression

A sleeping face barely has a face. The eyes close down to a single stroke and almost everything that says asleep happens outside the brackets. The closed-eye inventory is short, and none of these characters was encoded to be an eye.

Character Code point Name
_ U+FF3F FULLWIDTH LOW LINE
ー U+30FC KATAKANA-HIRAGANA PROLONGED SOUND MARK
ー U+FF70 HALFWIDTH KATAKANA-HIRAGANA PROLONGED SOUND MARK
˘ U+02D8 BREVE
ᵕ U+1D55 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL BOTTOM HALF O
∪ U+222A UNION
 ̄ U+FFE3 FULLWIDTH MACRON

˘ and ᵕ are both cups opening upward; ᵔ U+1D54 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL TOP HALF O is the same arc flipped over. Which of them reads as sleeping and which as smiling is decided by the mouth beside it, not by the eye itself — ( ˘ω˘ ) and ( ˘‿˘ ) use identical eyes and land in different places. The same upward cups run through cute kaomoji, where a smiling mouth turns them into shut-eyed delight instead of sleep.

The z trail

The z’s come in more than one size.

  • z U+007A and Z U+005A — ASCII, narrow
  • z U+FF5A and Z U+FF3A — fullwidth forms, each taking a whole character cell
  • ᶻ U+1DBB MODIFIER LETTER SMALL Z — a raised superscript z, narrow

A trail written in fullwidth forms stands well clear of the face and reads as slow, heavy breathing. zzZ in ASCII is quick and small and stays tucked against the bracket. ᶻ sits above the baseline, so it floats — which is why it is chosen when the z should look like it is drifting upward rather than lying on the line.

。o○ is a thought bubble

The other trail is a size ramp made of circles: 。 U+FF61 HALFWIDTH IDEOGRAPHIC FULL STOP, then a lowercase o, then ○ U+25CB WHITE CIRCLE. Three circles, each larger than the last, in exactly the position a comic would draw a thought bubble. (_ _)。o○ is someone asleep and dreaming. Order matters: reversed, the same three characters read as deflating.

スヤァ and half-width sound effects

( ˘ω˘ )スヤァ spells the Japanese sleeping noise suyaa in half-width katakana — ス U+FF7D, ヤ U+FF94 and ァ U+FF67 HALFWIDTH KATAKANA LETTER SMALL A. Written full-width as スヤァ it would be the same size as the face and read as shouting. Half-width makes the sound physically smaller than the sleeper. The Japanese page for this family, すやぁの顔文字, splits the faces by how far gone the sleeper is.

The lying-down body

(¦3[▓▓] is not a face at all, it is a side view. ¦ U+00A6 BROKEN BAR is the closed eye, the digit 3 is the mouth, and ▓ U+2593 DARK SHADE — a block-element shading character — is the duvet. Nothing in it is being used for its intended purpose.

A tired face and a puzzled one share most of the same closed eyes; the punctuation that separates them is on confused kaomoji. When it is the mouth that gives the sleeper away — the slack bracket hanging open in ( ˘﹃˘ ) — よだれ顔文字 sorts those faces by the single character doing the drooling. The rest of the parts are on the kaomoji hub.