Kaomoji: Copy and Paste Japanese Text Faces

How to copy a kaomoji

1. Find a face. Scroll the moods, tap a category such as Cute, Table flip or Cats, or type in the search box: happy, hug, bear, shrug, sleepy.
2. Tap it. The face goes to your clipboard and a green “Copied” label flashes on it. There is nothing else to press.
3. Paste it where you’re typing: Ctrl+V on Windows, ⌘V on a Mac, or a long press and Paste on a phone.

The faces you copy collect in Recently copied at the top, so the ones you use every day are one tap away next time. The list stays in this browser only. Copy all copies the whole list at once, and Share result gives you a link that opens your faces for someone else.

With a keyboard, the whole grid is a single Tab stop: Tab into it, move between faces with the arrow keys (Home and End jump to the first and last), press Enter or Space to copy, and Tab again to leave. In the search box, Enter jumps to the first match.

What kaomoji are, and how to read them

Kaomoji (顔文字, “face characters”) are the Japanese style of emoticon. Unlike the Western :-), which you read by tilting your head, a kaomoji is drawn upright: brackets make the outline of the head, and the characters inside make the eyes and mouth. Because Japanese keyboards type full-width characters and a large set of symbols, kaomoji borrow shapes from many writing systems:

• Eyes: ^ ^ are smiling, closed eyes; ◕ ◕ are big shiny eyes; T T and ╥ ╥ are streaming tears; ಠ ಠ (a letter of the Kannada alphabet) is a hard stare.
• Mouths: ▽ is an open, laughing mouth; ω (Greek omega) is the soft “cat mouth” of cute faces; Д (Cyrillic) is a shout; ﹏ is a wobbly, upset mouth.
• Arms and extras: ノ and ﾉ raise a hand or wave; づ and ⊂ ⊃ reach out for a hug; ╯ ︵ ┻━┻ throws a table; blush marks like 〃 or ⁄ ⁄ sit on the cheeks.

Once you know the parts, the moods read themselves: (≧▽≦) is squeezed-shut eyes and a big laugh, (｡•́︿•̀｡) is a trembling pout, and ┐(￣ヘ￣)┌ holds both hands up in a shrug.

Why a face can look different after you paste it

Kaomoji are plain Unicode text, so they work in messages, comments, usernames and documents, but each app draws them with its own font. The same face can come out wider, narrower, or with the eyes a little higher. That is normal: the characters haven’t changed. Faces made mostly of Japanese full-width characters, like (＾▽＾) or (￣︶￣), keep their proportions best because full-width characters are all the same size.

A small empty box (often called “tofu”) means the device has no font for one character. To keep that rare, every face on this page was checked against the fonts Android phones ship, and only uses scripts that iPhones include fonts for. Faces that needed extra fonts, such as some with Tibetan brackets, were left out. If someone still sees a box, they are probably on an old device or inside an app that uses its own limited font.

Tips

• Usernames and bios: some sites limit which characters a name may use. If a face is refused, try one made of simpler characters, like (^_^) or (=^･ω･^=).
• Symbols on their own: for a single heart, star, arrow or check mark, use the copy and paste symbols page, where every symbol shows its name and code.
• Bigger pictures: multi-line cats, hearts and flowers, and your words in big letters, are on the text art page.
• Sharing a set: the link holds only the faces you picked from this page, never anything you typed, and it opens on any device.