Shrug emoticon ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ to copy

A typed shrug does what a real one does. It can mean “I don’t know,” “oh well, it is what it is” or “your call,” and the sentence around it decides which. Mostly it is light: a small admission that you have no answer, or a way of letting something minor go.

• No idea: “where did the summer go ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”
• Oh well: “flight delayed again ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”
• Up to you: “pizza or tacos? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”
• Not my problem: the rude one, when it answers somebody else’s trouble

Read left to right, that is hand, forearm, upper arm, head, then the same again mirrored: nine characters in all. ツ was picked for its shape. Its two short strokes sit side by side along the top, like eyes, and the long stroke curves underneath like a grin. In シ (shi), the letter people swap in by mistake, the short strokes are stacked down the left side instead, so ¯\_(シ)_/¯ seems to glance sideways.

Nobody has documented who typed the shrug first. Its katakana face is why it gets filed with Japanese kaomoji, and in English it picked up the nickname “shruggie.”

Apps that use Markdown formatting, Reddit and Discord among them, treat a backslash as an instruction: show the next character as it is. So the backslash in ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ disappears to protect the underscore, and the post reads ¯_(ツ)_/¯ with the left forearm missing. It happens so often that a common reply on Reddit is a lone backslash and the words “you dropped this.”

• Type it as ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯ in Markdown apps. The first two backslashes print one backslash, and the third protects the underscore.
• On Discord, type /shrug and the app adds the shrug to the end of your message.
• Instagram captions and comments and Facebook posts don’t use Markdown, so the shrug pastes there with both arms.

🤷 arrived in Unicode 9.0 in 2016. Its formal character name is simply SHRUG, emoji lists call it person shrugging, and woman and man versions followed later that year, each in five skin tones. The text shrug is the drier, more deadpan of the two, while the emoji is friendlier and easier to read at a glance.

Between friends it is easy-going. From a business replying to a customer it can read as “not our problem.” If an order is late or a size has sold out, say what happens next first, and keep the shrug for small jokes at your own expense, like a bake that collapsed.

Tip: Save the shrug as a keyboard shortcut so you can type it anywhere. On an iPhone use Settings, General, Keyboard, Text Replacement; in Gboard, the personal dictionary; on a Samsung keyboard, Text shortcuts. Set a shortcut like “shrugg” and it turns into ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ as you type.