Lenny face: the ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) grin and its variations

The face reads as a knowing look: eyebrows up, a big nose and a small smirk. Usually it says “you know what I mean” or “I’m up to something.” It is often used for innuendo, so it can turn an innocent sentence into a suggestive one, which is worth remembering before you add it to a reply to a customer or a stranger.

It also works as plain silliness. Under a meme or in a group chat it can simply mean “heh,” and the variations shift the joke: the sunglasses version is smug, the crowd of faces is everyone in on it, and the face peeking round a wall is someone watching from a safe distance.

It was first posted on 18 November 2012 on Ylilauta, a Finnish imageboard, in a thread on its international board. By that morning, US time, it had reached 4chan, where it was posted so often that users were banned for spamming it, and from there it spread across Reddit, YouTube comments and the rest of the internet. English-speaking users named it Lenny, and nobody has documented why.

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) is 11 Unicode characters: two brackets, three spaces, two degree signs for the eyes, one letter for the nose and three combining marks. The eyebrows are the double inverted breve (U+0361), an accent that stretches over two characters at once, here a space and a degree sign. The nose is ʖ, a phonetic letter called the inverted glottal stop, and the smile is the double breve below (U+035C), which hangs under the space and the ʖ.

Every variation keeps that skeleton and swaps a part. Replace one ° with ~ and the face winks. Use ʖ̯ in place of ͜ʖ and the smile turns down. Swap the eyes for ◉, ♥ or $ and the mood changes with them.

• Accent placement. The eyebrows and the smile are combining marks that have to stretch across two characters. Some fonts and apps put them over one character only, or nudge them sideways, so the face looks lopsided. The characters are still right, and another phone may show it perfectly.
• Borrowed letters. Several variations use letters from other scripts: ง is Thai, ຈ is Lao, ಠ is Kannada, ل is Arabic, ༼ ༽ are Tibetan marks and ᕦ ᕤ are Canadian syllabics. A phone with no font for one of those scripts shows a box in its place.
• Long faces. The crowd and the banknote are long runs of brackets and marks. In a narrow comment box they can wrap onto a second line, which breaks the picture, so they work better in captions than in bios.

• Between friends, in comments, DMs and group chats, it lands as a wink.
• From a brand account it can work for a playful tease about a launch, but not in answers to complaints, prices or delivery questions.
• One face per message is plenty. A single ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) at the end lands the joke; a row of them reads as spam.