Kaomoji, sorted by mood
Japanese emoticons by mood, a click to copy. They are ordinary text, so they paste anywhere.
The catalog
No face matches that search.
Happy
Cute and shy
Love and hugs
Excited
Sad
Angry
Table flipping
Shrug and confusion
Surprised
Tired and bored
Cool and smug
Animals
Action and dancing
Sparkles and magic
Greetings and apologies
Why they read upright
A Western smiley is read sideways: the colon is the eyes and you tilt your head. A kaomoji is read the way it sits, which frees the eyes to carry the whole expression. That is the reason ಠ, ◕, ﹏ and ᴥ end up doing so much work here, and why a face can be angry, embarrassed or half asleep without a single punctuation mark changing.
The characters come from several scripts at once, so a face can borrow a Japanese bracket, a Cyrillic letter and a Kannada eye in the same line. That is also the failure mode: a device missing one of those fonts draws a box, and the face falls apart. The shorter ones survive anywhere.
Pasting one without breaking it
- It is text. Copy a face and it goes into a bio, a commit message or a chat like any other word.
- Watch the field's own limit. A face is several characters, not 1. On a bio capped at 150 that matters, and the emoji counter gives the exact number.
- Autocorrect is the enemy. Some apps helpfully turn the brackets into smart quotes. Paste rather than retype, and check the result before sending.
- A screen reader reads every character. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is announced as macron, underscore, katakana tsu, and so on, so keep the meaning of a message in the words around it.
More catalogs
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Emoji list
Every emoji Unicode defines, searchable, with a tray for the ones you are collecting.
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Symbols
Arrows, stars, maths, currency, lines and music. Plain characters, 1 click to copy.
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Emoji shortcodes
The :colon: codes Slack, Discord and GitHub expand, with a line converter.
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Emoji on social apps
Which emoji survive Facebook, X, Instagram and TikTok, and what each one changes.
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Emoji meanings
The official name and keywords behind every emoji, with the ones people read 2 ways.
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Emoji by platform
The same character, drawn 4 ways, next to whatever your own device draws.
Reading about an emoji, and using one
A catalog tells you what an emoji means and copies it for you. Emojery is what turns it into a reaction on the page you found it for, next to everyone else's.