Kaomoji: Japanese text faces to copy

A kaomoji stands upright on one line. Brackets usually draw the head, the eyes carry the feeling, and arms, tears or props sit outside the brackets. Compare (^_^) with (T_T): the mouth is the same underscore, and the eyes alone turn a smile into tears. Sideways emoticons, first proposed in 1982, work the other way round, which is why :-) and :-( differ only in the mouth.

Japanese character sets have long included Greek and Cyrillic letters, full-width punctuation and box-drawing lines, which is why those turn up as face parts. The ω in (=^･ω･^=) is the Greek omega, used as a cat’s mouth. The Д in ヽ(`Д´)ﾉ is the Cyrillic letter De, opened wide to shout. ┻━┻ is three box-drawing characters that happen to look like a table. Users of the Japanese forum 2channel went further and borrowed from other scripts: the eyes of ಠ_ಠ are a letter from Kannada, a script of southern India, and the face in the shrug ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is the katakana letter tsu.

Because a kaomoji is ordinary text, it takes the colour and font of whatever surrounds it, and you can edit it one character at a time: add a blush, swap the eyes, tack a ♡ onto the end. An emoji is one fixed picture that you can only swap for another.

• Mixed fonts. Each character is drawn by whichever font the phone has for that script, so a face that mixes Kannada, Thai and Japanese can look lopsided, and it rarely looks the same on an iPhone and an Android phone.
• Stacked accents. In (｡•́︿•̀｡) and (ง •̀_•́)ง, accent marks sit on top of a dot to make eyebrows. Some apps and fonts place the mark beside the dot instead, which changes the expression.
• Formatting apps. In apps that read a backslash or underscores as formatting, such as Discord and Reddit, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ loses an arm. Type the backslash twice there. Instagram captions and comments have no such formatting, so the shrug pastes as is.
• Width. Full-width characters, as in ＼(^o^)／ and (＾▽＾), are as wide as a Japanese character and take more of a narrow bio line than you would expect.
• Old devices. A phone with no font for a script shows empty boxes where those letters should be. Faces built only from ^ _ ; and brackets are the safest choice if many of your followers use old phones.

Tip: Screen readers read a kaomoji one character at a time, so (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ comes out as a string of symbol names. Put the face after the words that carry the message, never in place of them.

Faces work anywhere that takes free text: bios, captions, comments, DMs, Stories, Notes and Facebook posts. Each one eats into a bio’s 150-character limit, though. The shrug uses 9 characters and the table flip 12, so a bio rarely has room for more than one.

One face per caption usually does the job. At the end of a line it sets the tone the way an emoji would, while three in a row become clutter. From a business account, gentle faces read as friendly: m(_ _)m for a thank-you or an apology, (^_^;) for an awkward “we sold out.” Keep the table flips for your own jokes, not for answers to customers.