Shrug Emoticon

Anatomy of a shrug

The classic shrug is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, and every piece is a separate character with a specific job. The ¯ at each end is MACRON (U+00AF), drawn as a short horizontal bar, which here stands for a hand. The backslash and the forward slash are the arms, and the underscores are the shoulders, drawing a line from arm to head. The head is (ツ), parentheses around ツ (KATAKANA LETTER TU), a Japanese letter whose shape reads as a smiling face.

None of those characters is a combining mark, so the shrug is more stable than the lenny face. Its weak point is not font support. It is formatting.

The missing arm problem

In Markdown, the backslash is an escape character. A backslash before an underscore means “treat this underscore as a plain character”, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ typed in a Markdown field loses the backslash, and the result looks like ¯_(ツ)_/¯, with no left arm. Underscores are also used for emphasis, so the two underscores can switch italics on for the text in between. The shrug survives in some systems and is mangled in others, depending on the Markdown flavour the site uses.

There are three fixes:

1. Escape the characters. Write ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯, with a double backslash and a backslash before each underscore. That is what the second group on this page contains.
2. Use a code block. Put the shrug in backticks or a fenced block so Markdown leaves it alone.
3. Use the app’s own command. Slack and Discord both provide a /shrug command that adds the shrug for you.

Chat and forum systems differ in how they apply Markdown, and we have not verified every one. Reddit, for example, is known to need the escaped version in its Markdown editor, but if the result looks wrong in your app, try the other methods.

Variants

The shrug is easy to alter because only the head changes. ʘ‿ʘ gives it wide eyes, and ಥ gives it a tearful look. (ಥ, from the Kannada block, requires a font with Kannada, which most devices have, though some game clients do not.) The bracket-shaped ༼ ༽ are Tibetan marks (TIBETAN MARK ANG KHANG GYON and GYAS), used purely for their shape. ⊙ and ʖ are borrowed from maths and phonetics.

The upright shrugs in the third group, such as ┐(´ー`)┌, come from the kaomoji tradition, where the arms are box-drawing characters instead of slashes. Because they avoid the backslash and underscores, they survive Markdown without needing to be escaped. They read as a slightly different gesture, a resigned drop of the shoulders rather than a raised-hands shrug.

The shrug emoji

🤷 is SHRUG, U+1F937, which was added to Unicode in 2016 as part of Unicode 9 and Emoji 3.0, and supports skin tone and gender variants. It is drawn differently by each platform, and it is not subject to Markdown problems, since it is a single character. On the other hand it carries a different tone to the text shrug: the text version is more ironic, while the emoji is more neutral. If you need the same shrug on every platform and you do not want to fight formatting, the emoji is the simplest option.

Where it works

In bios and display names, platforms may filter the characters, and some strip the macron. Test where you will use it.

Typing it

1. Copy and paste from this page.
2. Text replacement. On iPhone, iPad and Mac, add “shrug” as a shortcut for the shrug. On Android and Windows, a keyboard app or text expander can do the same.
3. Typing ¯. On Windows, Alt and 0175 on the numeric keypad. On a Mac US layout, Option, Shift and comma.
4. Typing ツ. Use a Japanese keyboard and type tsu, or copy it.

Accessibility

A screen reader may read the shrug as “macron, backslash, underscore, left parenthesis, katakana letter tu” and so on, which is a lot of noise for a simple gesture. The emoji, by comparison, is announced as “shrug”. If someone must hear your message clearly, use 🤷, or write “shrug” in words. The fancy text accessibility guide says more. For related faces, see the text faces hub and table flip.