Japanese Emoticons
Kaomoji are Japanese emoticons built from punctuation rather than pictures. Where a Western emoticon turns a colon and a bracket into a face, a kaomoji draws the whole head — eyes, mouth, sometimes arms — out of full-width brackets, slashes, dots and characters borrowed from a dozen writing systems. The result reads as an illustration made of text.
That construction is why they work in far more places than emoji do. A kaomoji is plain Unicode text, not an image, so it survives being pasted into a username, a file name, a commit message or a plain-text email. Nothing has to support a special character set, because every character in it is ordinary punctuation that has been around for decades.
The groups below are organised by mood rather than by construction, because that is how people actually look for them. Pick a category, tap any face to copy it, and paste it wherever you need it. The faces in each group are the well-established forms rather than one-off inventions, so they will read the way you expect to anyone who knows the format.
Happy
Grinning, cheering and celebratory faces for good news.
Cute
Soft, sweet faces with flowers and sparkles.
Love
Hearts, blushes and kisses for affectionate messages.
Sad
Crying and downcast faces for when things go wrong.
Angry
Annoyed, irritated and furious faces.
Table Flip
The classic frustration flips, and the apology that follows.
Shrug
Inexplicable indifference, composed entirely of punctuation.
Animals
Bears, cats, dogs and one squid.
How to use it
- 01
Find the mood you want
Scan the categories below — happy, cute, love, sad, angry, table flip, shrug and animals. Each face carries a short label describing what it conveys, so you can tell similar-looking ones apart.
- 02
Tap to copy
Click or tap any face and it is copied to your clipboard. The label underneath tells you what it means, which is the part that is not obvious if you are new to kaomoji.
- 03
Paste it
Paste with Ctrl+V or Cmd+V. Kaomoji are ordinary Unicode text, so they work in Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS, forum posts, social bios and anywhere else you can type.
Frequently asked questions
What is a kaomoji?
A Japanese emoticon assembled from punctuation and typographic characters rather than from images. The name combines the Japanese words for face and character. Most are drawn from full-width brackets, slashes and dots, sometimes with letters from other scripts standing in for eyes or arms.
What is the difference between a kaomoji and an emoji?
An emoji is a single pictographic code point that the platform renders as a picture, so its appearance is controlled by whoever makes your device. A kaomoji is a string of ordinary text characters, so it renders the same shape everywhere and works in places that reject emoji entirely.
Do kaomoji work in usernames and file names?
Often, though it depends on how strict the field is. Because every character is standard punctuation, most systems accept them. Watch the length: a single kaomoji can be eight or ten characters, so a face can consume a surprising share of a thirty-two character nickname limit.
Why does my kaomoji look broken on some sites?
The site is stripping or re-encoding characters outside its allowed set, usually on save rather than on paste. Kaomoji that mix half-width and full-width characters are the most likely to be mangled. If a form rewrites yours, that field is normalising input and no amount of re-pasting will help.
Are kaomoji still used?
Yes, and they have outlasted several waves of emoji. Their advantage has not changed: they work as plain text, they render identically across platforms, and they offer a much wider range of expressions than the emoji set defines.