Lenny Face

What the lenny face is

The lenny face, written ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°), is a smirk made of seven pieces: parentheses, two degree signs for eyes, a mouth built from a Latin letter, and two small arcs. It spread through imageboards and forums in the early 2010s and has been reused in chat apps ever since. Its exact first appearance is unconfirmed, so we do not name one. What can be said precisely is how it is built, because that is what decides whether it works on your screen.

The anatomy

The two arcs are the difficult part. A combining character is not drawn on its own. It is drawn on top of or underneath the character before it, and the renderer decides where. The “double” marks in the table are designed to stretch across two characters, which is why they span both the parenthesis and the eye. When the renderer does not support stretching, the arc sits over only one of them, or floats high, or overlaps the line above.

Why it breaks

Three things go wrong with combining marks.

Positioning. Different fonts put the arc at different heights. In a tall line, the upper arc can collide with the line above, and in a tight line it is clipped at the top.

Normalisation and stripping. Some systems strip or reorder combining marks, either for security or for plain-text consistency. Names and handle fields often do this. The face then appears with missing arcs, or the field rejects it entirely.

Counting. A combining mark is a separate code point, so a limit measured in characters can count it as one even though you do not see it as a separate shape. An unseen mark also may be counted by a system that counts graphemes differently. Neither method is documented for most apps, so a face that looks like 7 characters can take 9 or more.

If a face displays badly, switch to the third group on this page. The versions with no combining marks look like a simplified cousin, but they pass through every app the same way.

Variants and what they change

The variants play with eyes and extras. Replacing the eyes changes the mood: a tilde for a wink, ᵔ (MODIFIER LETTER SMALL TOP HALF O) for a pleased look, o for surprise. Adding arms with ᕦ and ᕤ (CANADIAN SYLLABICS THA and CANADIAN SYLLABICS THO, from the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics block, used purely for their shape) gives the flexing version. The sunglasses version is a string of box and block characters (⌐ and ■) that depend on those characters being present.

The “army” version nests the face. It stacks many combining marks and many parentheses, so it is the most likely to wrap onto a second line, to be clipped, or to be rejected.

Where to use it, and where not

A lenny face is informal. It is most at home in chat among friends who know the joke. In professional messages, customer support or any context where tone is uncertain, a plain word and a normal emoji are safer, and in some contexts the face is widely read as suggestive or smug. This is a judgement about tone, not a technical rule, and it is why we put the least risky options first in the other groups on this page.

On platforms that accept free text, the face usually pastes. In a username or a field with filtering, it may be rejected. Character limits explains how apps count characters and why combining marks make that count unpredictable.

Typing it

1. Copy and paste is the simplest.
2. Text replacement. On iPhone, iPad and Mac, go to the keyboard settings, add a text replacement with a short phrase such as “lenny” and paste the face in as the replacement. Android keyboards and Windows text expanders offer the same idea.
3. Unicode input. In Word, type 0361 and press Alt then X to enter the arc. This is fiddly and is rarely worth it.

There is no Alt code for the face and no keyboard shortcut.

Accessibility

A screen reader reads the face by the name of each piece: “left parenthesis”, “combining double inverted breve”, “degree sign”, and so on. Some readers skip combining marks, so the experience differs from reader to reader. The result is a string of technical names where the sender meant a smirk. Put the message first, use one face at most, and avoid it in text that someone must be able to hear clearly. The fancy text accessibility guide goes into this.

For other faces, see the text faces hub, the kaomoji page and the shrug page.