> ASCII Emoticons_

What Are Kaomoji?

Kaomoji are Japanese-style text emoticons that use a wider range of Unicode characters to create expressive faces. Unlike Western emoticons (which are read sideways), kaomoji are read face-on and can convey more complex emotions.

History of ASCII Emoticons

The first documented use of a text-based emoticon is often credited to Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, who posted :-) and :-( on a bulletin board system on September 19, 1982 to distinguish jokes from serious posts. The idea spread rapidly across early internet communities such as Usenet, where users developed hundreds of variations.

Western emoticons like :-) are read sideways — tilt your head to the left and the colon becomes eyes, the hyphen a nose, and the parenthesis a mouth. Japanese kaomoji, by contrast, are designed to be read upright. They emerged on Japanese internet forums in the 1980s and expanded dramatically as Unicode support allowed access to a much wider character set. The iconic shrug emoticon ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ combines Japanese katakana (ツ = "tsu") with ASCII symbols.

Western Emoticons vs Kaomoji

The two traditions differ in orientation, character set, and expressiveness. Western emoticons use basic ASCII punctuation (colons, parentheses, hyphens) and are read on their side. Kaomoji use a much broader Unicode range including Japanese characters, combining diacritics, box-drawing characters, and mathematical symbols. Kaomoji are read face-on and can represent complex emotional states, actions, and even entire narratives that would be impossible with basic ASCII alone.

Unicode and Emoji

Modern emoji (pictographic symbols rendered as small images) evolved from both ASCII emoticons and kaomoji. Shigetaka Kurita designed the first set of 176 emoji for NTT DoCoMo in Japan in 1999, drawing inspiration from weather symbols, Chinese characters, and kaomoji. Unicode standardised emoji in 2010, and they are now part of the same encoding standard that underlies ASCII. Today there are over 3,600 standardised emoji, but ASCII emoticons and kaomoji remain popular for their universality — they render identically on every platform, device, and era of technology, requiring only basic text support.

How to Use ASCII Emoticons

Click any emoticon on this page to copy it to your clipboard instantly. You can then paste it into any text field: chat applications, email, code comments, social media posts, or terminal output. Because these are plain Unicode text characters, they are supported everywhere that displays text — no image support or special font required. The shrug (¯\_(ツ)_/¯), lenny face ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°), and table flip (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻) are among the most widely recognised across English-speaking internet communities.