Copy ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) from the panel above and paste it where you need it. The Lenny face is a sequence of eleven code points rather than one character, and no platform ships a key or shortcut that produces the whole run, so copying is the route that always works. The panel also carries the winking, disapproving, and flexing variants.
Lenny belongs to the wider family of Japanese-style kaomoji faces and works the way they do, by borrowing letters and marks from scripts that were never meant for drawing expressions.
Identify the characters in the Lenny face
The classic face ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) is, in order, U+0028 LEFT PARENTHESIS, U+0020 SPACE, U+0361 COMBINING DOUBLE INVERTED BREVE, U+00B0 DEGREE SIGN, U+0020 SPACE, U+035C COMBINING DOUBLE BREVE BELOW, U+0296 LATIN LETTER INVERTED GLOTTAL STOP, U+0020 SPACE, U+0361, U+00B0, and U+0029 RIGHT PARENTHESIS.
The brackets and spaces are ASCII, the eyes are the degree sign from Latin-1 Supplement, the mouth is a phonetic letter from IPA Extensions, and the brows and curve are combining marks from Combining Diacritical Marks. The winking variant ( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°) swaps one eye for U+007E TILDE, the disapproving variant ( ͡ಠ ʖ̯ ͡ಠ) uses U+0CA0 KANNADA LETTER TTHA for both eyes with U+032F COMBINING INVERTED BREVE BELOW under the mouth, and the flexing variant ᕦ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ᕤ adds U+1566 CANADIAN SYLLABICS THA and U+1564 CANADIAN SYLLABICS THO as arms.
Substituted lookalikes are what break the face. The eye is U+00B0 DEGREE SIGN, not U+00BA MASCULINE ORDINAL INDICATOR and not U+02DA RING ABOVE. The mouth is U+0296 LATIN LETTER INVERTED GLOTTAL STOP, not U+0294 LATIN LETTER GLOTTAL STOP. The brow is the double form U+0361, not the single-base U+0311 COMBINING INVERTED BREVE.
Insert kaomoji from the Windows emoji panel
Microsoft documents an emoji panel that opens with the Windows logo key and the period key during text entry, and names Kaomoji as one of its categories alongside Emoji, GIF, Symbols, and clipboard history. Select that category and choose a face. The panel lists the faces Windows ships, so it is a source of ready-made kaomoji rather than a guarantee that this exact sequence appears.
Build the face in Word with Alt and X
Microsoft documents a Unicode conversion in Word. Type the character code, press Alt, and then press X, and Word replaces the code with the character it names, so 0296 gives the mouth and 00B0 gives an eye. Microsoft's separate Alt code method is a different route that requires the numeric keypad.
The combining marks convert the same way but are not standalone glyphs. U+0361 and U+035C arch across two characters, attaching to the character before and reaching over the character after, which is what draws the brow above and the curve below. Enter the codes in the order listed above.
Copy the pieces with Windows Character Map
Character Map is built into Windows and shows the characters available in a selected font. Microsoft's instructions are to type the word character into the taskbar search box, open Character Map from the results, then copy individual characters or a group of characters to the clipboard and paste them into any program that can display them. It also shows whether a font actually covers U+0296 and the combining marks.
Insert the pieces on Mac with Character Viewer
Apple documents opening the viewer with Fn-E or the Globe key and E, or by choosing Edit and then Emoji & Symbols. It has a search field, so you can look for a piece by a descriptive word rather than by key position, and Apple documents an Add to Favorites action that keeps a character in a Favorites category for reuse.
Insert the pieces in Google Docs or Slides
In Google Docs or Slides, choose Insert, then Symbols, then Special characters. Google documents three ways to find a character there, which are picking from categories, entering the character's Unicode value, and writing the character in the box on the right. Google states that special characters cannot be inserted directly in Sheets, so paste a finished face into a cell instead.
Put the Lenny face on a web page
A document served as UTF-8 can contain the face directly, and the Encoding Standard requires UTF-8 for new content and requires authors to label it with the utf-8 name. That one setting prevents most of the mangled output people see after a face travels through a template, a feed, or a database.
Numeric character references are the fallback. The HTML Standard defines a decimal form and a hexadecimal form, so ʖ writes the mouth and ͡ writes the brow.
Fix a broken Lenny face
- 1.Confirm the file or page is UTF-8, since a wrong encoding is the usual cause of replacement characters and stray accented letters.
- 2.Check that each eye is U+00B0 and not U+00BA or U+02DA, and that the mouth is U+0296 and not U+0294.
- 3.Check the order of the run, because a combining mark that has moved attaches to the wrong neighbor.
- 4.Switch to a font that covers IPA Extensions and the combining marks, since coverage gaps show as boxes or bare marks.
- 5.Expect the brackets and eyes to survive and the brows and curve to vanish in a field that strips combining marks.
- 6.Fall back to a standalone character such as a star symbol when a field refuses combining marks outright.
None of the inner characters has a key of its own. A character like the at sign has a fixed keyboard position, so a broken at sign points at the layout, while a broken Lenny face points at encoding or font coverage.
Common questions
Is there a keyboard shortcut for the Lenny face?
No vendor documents one. Windows offers a Kaomoji category and Word converts single code points with Alt and X, but the full sequence has no shortcut on any platform.
Which character are the eyes?
U+00B0 DEGREE SIGN, the same character used for temperatures and angles. The disapproving variant uses U+0CA0 KANNADA LETTER TTHA instead, a letter of the Kannada script rather than a symbol.
Why does the face show boxes or stray marks?
Either the font does not cover every block involved, or the text was decoded with the wrong encoding. The combining marks fail first, because they depend on the font's positioning data rather than on a standalone glyph.
Official references
- Unicode Latin-1 Supplement chart
- Unicode IPA Extensions chart
- Unicode Spacing Modifier Letters chart
- Unicode Combining Diacritical Marks chart
- Unicode Kannada chart
- Unicode Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics chart
- Microsoft guide to the Windows emoji panel and text tools
- Microsoft guide to ASCII and Unicode characters
- Apple guide to emoji and symbols on Mac
- Google Docs special-character guide
- HTML character-reference syntax
- WHATWG Encoding Standard
