Text Faces ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) — 300+ Japanese Emoticons to Copy

Japanese emoticons are text faces read upright rather than sideways — (｡◕‿◕｡) needs no head-tilting, where the Western `:-)` does. They are known in Japan as kaomoji, and they are the reason this style has such range: the expression lives in the eyes, and the eyes can be almost anything.

How they differ from Western emoticons

A sideways emoticon has roughly two adjustable parts, eyes and mouth, each from a small set. That caps the vocabulary at a few dozen recognisable faces.

A Japanese emoticon has five independently variable parts — eyes, mouth, frame, arms and decoration. That is why this tradition can express sleepiness, smugness, embarrassment and mild suspicion as distinct faces, where the sideways tradition has one smile and one frown.

Research on cross-cultural expression reading found the same split in real faces: Japanese viewers weight the eyes more heavily when judging emotion, Western viewers weight the mouth. The two emoticon traditions reflect their own conventions almost exactly.

Conventions worth knowing

A few marks recur and mean specific things. The slashes in (*/ω＼*) are blush marks borrowed from manga and mean embarrassment. The semicolon in (´･ω･`;) is a sweat drop, meaning nervousness or awkwardness. A `w` at the end means laughter, from 笑 (warai). Small ﾟ and ｡ scattered around a face are tears or sparkles depending on placement.

Knowing those four turns most faces from decoration into something you can actually read.

Where they work

Japanese emoticons render identically in Discord, WhatsApp, Instagram, LINE, Telegram, X and most game chats, because they are characters rather than images. They also work in display names, where emoji are frequently rejected.

The limits: strict @username fields refuse them, faces built from rare scripts can render as boxes on older Android phones, and anything containing a backslash needs it doubled on Reddit and Discord or the character is eaten by markdown.

Related collections

The full Japanese tradition is on kaomoji, with the searchable version on the kaomoji keyboard. Emoticons covers the sideways Western style, cute kaomoji the softest end of this one, and かわいい顔文字 is the Japanese-language edition.