Lenny Face
Copy the Lenny face ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) and its variants below, then see the exact Unicode breakdown and where it came from.
Copy the Lenny face and its variants
The classic Lenny face ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) is one of the most-copied text faces on the internet — a smug, smirking look built entirely from Unicode characters, not an image. Tap it above to copy the original, or pick a mood variant below: angry, sad, surprised, wide-eyed or magnifying-glass Lenny. Every version is plain text, so it pastes cleanly into any chat, comment box or caption.
Anatomy of the Lenny face: the exact Unicode
Unlike a keyboard emoticon such as :), the Lenny face uses combining diacritical marks — invisible-on-their-own characters that Unicode fuses onto the character before them to build the eyes and mouth. Here is every code point in ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°), left to right:
- ( —
U+0028LEFT PARENTHESIS. The left edge of the face. - [space] ͡ ° — the left eye.
U+0361COMBINING DOUBLE INVERTED BREVE ties the preceding space toU+00B0DEGREE SIGN, stretching a connecting arc over both so the pair reads as one wide, raised eye. - [space] ͜ ʖ — the mouth.
U+035CCOMBINING DOUBLE BREVE BELOW ties a space toU+0296LATIN LETTER INVERTED GLOTTAL STOP (an IPA phonetic symbol, not a Latin letter despite its Unicode block name), producing the sideways, faintly smug mouth shape. - [space] ͡ ° — the right eye, the same
U+0361+U+00B0pair repeated. - ) —
U+0029RIGHT PARENTHESIS. The right edge of the face.
Where the Lenny face came from
According to Know Your Meme's documented timeline, one of the earliest recorded appearances of ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) was posted to Ylilauta, a Finnish imageboard, at 8:45 a.m. EST on November 18, 2012 — dropped into an unrelated thread about the site's spam filter with the caption 'this thread is leaking from the heavens.' From there it jumped to 4chan, where it was posted so relentlessly that some users were temporarily banned for spamming it, and spread to Reddit, YouTube comments and other forums within days. The name 'Lenny face' itself is harder to pin down — Know Your Meme describes its origin as obscure, most likely coined casually on 4chan or Reddit sometime in that same short window, with 'Le Lenny Face' and 'Le Face Face' circulating as early alternate names before 'Lenny' stuck. One documented curiosity from that period: a Tumblr user ran the raw character sequence through a text-to-speech reader, which pronounced it 'deg deg' — apparently parsing the two degree signs used as eyes.
Cross-platform render matrix — when the Lenny face fails
Because it leans on combining diacritics rather than a single emoji code point, the Lenny face is more font-dependent than most text faces. How it behaves where you're likely to paste it:
- iOS / macOS (Messages, Notes, Safari): renders correctly — Apple's system font (SF Pro) has full support for the combining marks used here.
- Android (Gboard, Samsung Keyboard): generally fine on modern devices; older Android versions (pre-Android 9) and some budget-phone fonts can show the eyes and mouth slightly detached from the parentheses instead of tightly overlapping.
- Discord & Slack: renders correctly in both messages and code blocks — no markdown conflicts, since none of the characters are markdown syntax.
- X / Twitter: renders fine and counts as 9 characters against the limit; it does not get compressed or auto-corrected.
- Reddit (old.reddit.com vs new Reddit): both render it correctly today, though extremely old browsers without proper Unicode combining-mark support could show the eyes and mouth as separate, non-overlapping glyphs — a known 2012-era rendering complaint that mostly disappeared once browsers modernized their text-shaping engines.
- Plain-text environments (Notepad, some terminals, older SMS): the biggest risk area — monospace fonts with incomplete Unicode coverage can render the combining marks as separate floating accents above/below the degree signs instead of fusing them, making the face look broken. If you need guaranteed rendering in a code comment or terminal, the plain ASCII shrug is the safer choice; Lenny face is a chat-and-social face, not a code-safe one.
Lenny face variants, compared
Once ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) went viral, the community built out a small family of moods by swapping the eye and mouth characters — copy any of them from the grid above:
- Classic ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°): the neutral smug/knowing smirk — the default, all-purpose version.
- Wide Lenny ( ͡⊙ ͜ʖ ͡⊙): swaps the degree-sign eyes for the larger circled-dot symbol (⊙), reading as more surprised or wide-eyed than smug.
- Angry Lenny ( ͠° ͟ʖ ͡°): uses a different combining tie (
U+0360/U+035Ffamily) that shifts the brow angle, giving a sharper, more irritated look. - Sad Lenny ( ͡° ʖ̯ ͡°): adds a downturn to the mouth character, reading as disappointed rather than smug.
- Magnifying Lenny ( ͡ᵔ ͜ʖ ͡ᵔ ): replaces the eyes with a curved 'ᵔ' shape for a softer, more amused expression — closer to a genuine smile than a smirk.
- Big-eyes Lenny ( ͡◉ ͜ʖ ͡◉): uses the fisheye symbol (◉) for a more cartoonish, exaggerated stare.
Lenny face vs kaomoji — a genuine difference, not just trivia
It's worth being precise about this: unlike almost every other face on this site, the Lenny face is not part of the traditional Japanese kaomoji lineage. It was invented on a Western imageboard, using an IPA phonetic letter and Unicode combining diacritics rather than the Japanese katakana/hiragana borrowing typical of real kaomoji like the shrug or bear. It's best understood as a parallel, independently-invented text face that happens to share the same general 'build a face from characters' technique — see the full what is a kaomoji guide for how the two traditions differ.
FAQ
What is the Lenny face?
The Lenny face is ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) — a smirking text face built from Latin letters and Unicode combining diacritics rather than the simple keyboard punctuation of Western emoticons like :) or :P. It reads as a sly, knowing smirk and became one of the most-copied text faces on the internet after going viral in late 2012.
How do I type the Lenny face from scratch?
You technically can: type ( then a space, then hold the combining-character sequence U+0361 + ° (degree sign), then a space, U+035C + ʖ, a space, U+0361 + ° again, then ). In practice almost nobody types it by hand — the combining marks aren't on any standard keyboard layout, so copying it (from the grid above, or from a Lenny face generator) is the normal method on every platform.
Why is it called 'Lenny face'?
The name's origin is genuinely disputed — Know Your Meme notes it was likely coined casually in a 4chan or Reddit thread within days of the face going viral in November 2012, and no single definitive source claims credit for it. 'Le Lenny Face' and 'Le Face Face' were both used as nicknames early on before 'Lenny face' won out.
Does the Lenny face mean something sexual?
It's often used with an implied innuendo or 'you know what I mean' subtext, especially in comment sections and gaming chat, but it's just as commonly used for plain sarcasm, mischief, or a knowing joke with no sexual meaning at all. Read it from context — the face itself is deliberately ambiguous, which is part of why it spread so widely.