Kaomoji guide: how to read, type and understand Japanese text faces

Learn the anatomy of a kaomoji, which alphabets its eyes and arms are borrowed from, how to type them on iPhone and Android, and 20 starter faces with meanings.

Updated 25 September 2026

A kaomoji looks like a random pile of punctuation until you know what each piece is doing. After that, (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ stops being noise and becomes a person, two raised arms, a thrown table. This guide takes the faces apart, explains which writing systems the parts were borrowed from, and shows the quickest ways to type them on a phone. If you just want faces to copy, the kaomoji collection has hundreds sorted by mood; this page is for understanding them.

Anatomy: brackets, eyes, mouth, cheeks, arms

Read a kaomoji from the inside out. The core is the eyes and mouth, which sit between a pair of brackets that stand in for the outline of the face. Everything outside the brackets is arms, hands or props.

• Brackets: ( ) is the default face shape. Full-width （ ） make a wider, rounder face. ꒰ ꒱ and ᐢ ᐢ give a soft, cat-eared outline, and 【 】 or 〔 〕 read as boxy or robotic.
• Eyes: the pair of characters on either side of the mouth. ^ ^ is a happy squint, ・ ・ or • • are neutral dots, ° ° or ⊙ ⊙ are wide with surprise, > < is squeezing shut, T T and ; ; are streaming tears, ¬ ¬ is a sideways glance and ◕ ◕ are big shiny anime eyes.
• Mouth: the character in the middle. _ is a flat, calm line, ω is a small cat-like pout, ▽ is a wide grin, Д is a wide-open shout, ε is puckered lips, and 益 is clenched teeth.
• Cheeks: optional marks just inside the brackets. ´ ` on either side of the eyes act as eyebrows or a nervous sweat drop, 〃 or ๑ suggest blushing, and ; next to the face is a single bead of sweat.
• Arms and hands: ノ ﾉ ヽ are raised arms, ╯ ╰ are arms mid-action, ٩ ۶ are fists in the air, m m or _ _ are hands pressed flat on the floor for a bow, and づ っ are open hands reaching for a hug.
• Props and effects: ┻━┻ is a table, ✧ ･ﾟ ☆ are sparkles or magic, ︵ is the arc of something flying, and 三 is motion lines behind a runner.

Once you can name the parts, you can also change them. Keep a frame and swap the mouth: (・_・) is blank, (・ω・) is content, (・Д・) is startled. Add arms to make the same face act: ヽ(・ω・)ノ is that content face cheering.

Where the parts come from

Kaomoji were born on Japanese networks where the keyboard offered a full range of kana, full-width punctuation and, through the input method, characters from other scripts. The faces borrow whatever looked right, and the result is a small tour of Unicode:

• Japanese katakana. ツ (tsu) is the smiling face in the shrug, ノ (no) and ﾉ (its half-width form) are arms, ヮ (small wa) is an open mouth, ヽ is a katakana repetition mark used as a raised arm, and ﾟ (half-width handakuten) doubles as an eye or a floating sparkle. The Japanese full stop ｡ and the middle dot ・ turn up as eyes, cheeks and dust.
• Cyrillic. Д (De) is the classic gaping mouth in ( ﾟДﾟ), and ж occasionally stands in for a scrunched nose.
• Greek. ω (omega) is the most common cute mouth, ε is a kiss, and Ω sometimes plays a wide chin.
• Kannada. ಠ (the letter ttha) supplies the flat, disapproving stare in ಠ_ಠ, and ಥ is the same eye with a tear.
• Thai. ง (ngo ngu) is a raised fist in (ง’̀-’́)ง, and the digit ๑ makes round cheeks.
• Latin phonetic letters. ʕ and ʔ, the IPA pharyngeal fricative and glottal stop, form the round ears of the bear ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ, with the phonetic letter ᴥ as its nose. ʖ from the same block is the Lenny face mouth.
• Canadian Aboriginal syllabics. ᕕ and ᕗ are the running arms in ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ, ᐛ is its face, and ᕙ ᕗ flex the biceps in the strong-arm faces.
• Box drawing and CJK. ╯ ╰ ┻ ━ ┬ ─ come from the block used for drawing tables in terminals, which is exactly what the table-flip needs, and 益 and 三 are ordinary Chinese characters chosen for their shape.
• Maths and geometry. ∀ (for all) makes a wide mouth in ( ´∀`), ▽ △ □ ○ ◕ are geometric shapes, and ✧ ☆ ★ are from the Dingbats and miscellaneous symbols blocks.

None of these are drawings; they are letters and symbols with their own meanings in their own scripts, which is why a screen reader announces “Kannada letter ttha, low line, Kannada letter ttha” when it meets ಠ_ಠ. Kaomoji are decoration, and a message should still make sense without them.

Reading the emotion

Two questions decode most faces: what are the eyes doing, and are the arms up or down?

Happy faces have squinted or shiny eyes (^ ◕ ´ `) and a relaxed or grinning mouth (_ ω ▽). Sad faces have tears (T ; ಥ) or lowered eyes (´・ω・`). Angry faces show clenched teeth (益), sharp eyebrows (ಠ益ಠ) and often fists. Surprise is wide eyes (° ⊙ ロ) and an open mouth (Д ロ o). Embarrassment adds blush marks or sweat (〃 ๑ ;) to a small mouth. Smugness is half-closed eyes with a flat mouth (¬‿¬ or ¯ω¯). Tiredness is dashes for eyes (-_-) or a wavy mouth (´～`).

Then look at the arms. Both raised means cheering or celebrating; one raised is a wave; hands flat on the floor is a bow or apology; arms out to the sides holding something is either a gift or a threat depending on the prop. And a face with no brackets at all, like orz, is a whole body: the o is a head on the floor, r is the arms, z is the kneeling legs, giving despair.

Typing kaomoji on a phone

You do not have to assemble faces by hand. Both phone platforms have a built-in list once you know where it is.

iPhone. Add the Japanese keyboard in Settings → General → Keyboard → Keyboards → Add New Keyboard → Japanese → Kana. Switch to it with the 🌐 key, then tap the ^_^ key in the bottom row. A strip of kaomoji appears above the keys, and the ▽ arrow at the end of the strip expands it into a full grid of faces sorted by feeling. Pick one and switch back to your normal keyboard. The Japanese Romaji keyboard has the same key.

Android (Gboard). Tap the emoji button, then look for the emoticon tab at the bottom of the panel (its icon is a small text face such as :-) or ( ˃ᴗ˂ ) depending on version). It holds a scrolling list of kaomoji arranged by mood. Samsung Keyboard has a similar tab inside its emoji panel.

Windows and Mac. On Windows, Win + . opens the emoji panel, which has a kaomoji tab with faces grouped as happy, sad, angry and so on. macOS has no kaomoji list, but the Japanese input method’s suggestions include some faces, and the simplest route is to keep a few favourites in a Notes file or set them as text replacements in System Settings → Keyboard → Text Replacements.

For anything not in the built-in lists, copying from the emoticons hub is still quicker than hunting for the characters.

Rendering pitfalls

• Missing glyphs. Katakana, Cyrillic and Greek are on every modern device, but Kannada, Thai and Canadian syllabics can be absent from older Android phones and from game fonts, so ಠ_ಠ or ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ may show as boxes for some readers. The Lenny face’s combining marks are the most fragile of all. Why fonts show as boxes explains what to expect where.
• Half-width versus full-width. Japanese text has two widths for many characters. Mixing ( and （ in one face makes it lopsided, and full-width characters take up more of a character limit on some services.
• Markdown. Discord, Reddit, Slack and GitHub treat _ * ~ and backslashes as formatting. A face like m(_ _)m can turn part of a message italic, and the shrug’s backslash disappears unless you type it twice or wrap the face in backticks. The shrug page has escaped versions ready.
• Monospace fonts. In a code block or terminal every character is the same width, so faces designed around proportional spacing look stretched. Faces made only of ASCII, like orz or :3, survive best there.
• Autocorrect and emoji substitution. Some keyboards offer to replace :) with 🙂 or capitalise the first letter of a face. Check before sending.
• Combining marks. Faces that stack accents, such as (ง’̀-‘́)ง, rely on the app rendering combining characters; some games strip them, leaving (ง’-’)ง.

A starter set of 20

If you want faces that pair with a soft profile, the kawaii fonts page shows which letter styles sit well next to them, and the table flip and Lenny face pages go deep on their two most famous families.

Quick checklist

• Read eyes first, mouth second, then arms and props.
• The parts are real letters from Japanese, Cyrillic, Greek, Kannada, Thai and IPA, so screen readers will spell them out.
• iPhone: Japanese Kana keyboard → ^_^ key. Android: Gboard emoji panel → emoticon tab. Windows: Win + . → kaomoji tab.
• Match bracket widths and escape underscores and backslashes in Markdown apps.
• Copy rare-script faces from the collection rather than typing them, and expect them to fail on old devices.