Table Flip

A face, a motion and a table

The table flip (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ is a tiny comic strip. On the left is a person: a head in parentheses with degree-sign eyes and a square mouth, and arms made from arcs thrown upward. In the middle, ︵ draws the curve of the flying table. On the right, ┻━┻ is the table, now upside down. The reply, ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ), shows the same table the right way up, with a calmer person putting it back.

Every piece is a standard Unicode character, and knowing which ones lets you predict where the face will work.

The parts

None of these is a combining mark. A combining mark, such as the arcs in the lenny face, attaches itself to the character before it. Here every character stands alone. That makes the classic flip more robust than faces that rely on marks to hang over their neighbours.

Why the table sometimes falls apart

The table is made of box-drawing characters, which Unicode designed to meet at their edges and form continuous lines, in diagrams and terminal programs. For that to look right the font has to be monospace, where each character is the same width and height. Most chat apps and social platforms use proportional fonts for messages, so the table pieces may have small gaps, the legs may not line up with the top, or the whole table may sit slightly lower than the person.

There are other failure points:

• ಠ and ಥ in the angry and tearful variants come from the Kannada block and need a font that includes it. Without one, the eyes show as boxes.
• ヽ, ﾉ and Д in the longer variants come from Katakana, halfwidth Katakana and Cyrillic. They are widely supported, but a stripped font may lack them.
• The fullwidth bracket in the second face makes the face wider and the right side may not line up with the left.
• Length. The double flips are 20 or more characters, which may wrap onto a second line on a phone and break the picture.

If a flip looks wrong, switch to the classic one. It is the shortest and uses the most common characters.

Variants and what changes

The variants swap the face. ಠ益ಠ, with Kannada eyes and a Chinese character 益 as a wide-open mouth, adds anger. ◉Д◉ with Cyrillic Д gives shock. The ノ and 彡 are Japanese characters that add a motion trail. The puns on the reply include a shrug between two tables, using the shrug described on the shrug page, and a person cheering between two tables.

The “unflip” is not an invention of one group of speakers, but we have not traced its origin either. It is mostly used as a polite or sarcastic reply to a flip.

Using it

A table flip is informal and carries a joking tone of frustration. It suits casual chat, gaming and comment threads where people know the meme, and it does not suit support emails or any situation where frustration could land badly. The face usually pastes into plain-text fields but may be filtered from names and bios, and as a long string it counts as many characters toward any limit. Character limits explains how apps count them.

Typing

1. Copy and paste. Tap a face above.
2. Text replacement. On iOS and macOS, set “flip” as a shortcut for the face. Android keyboards and Windows text expanders do the same.
3. Box-drawing characters. In Word, type 253B and press Alt then X for ┻, 252C for ┬, and 2501 for ━. The Windows Alt codes for light and double lines, such as Alt+196 for ─ and Alt+205 for ═, come from the DOS set, but the heavy ones do not have Alt codes.

Accessibility

A screen reader reads each character of the table flip: “left parenthesis, box drawings light arc up and left, degree sign, white square” and so on, which is a long string of technical names for a joke. Place a plain sentence first, use at most one face, and avoid it in anything that someone must hear clearly. The fancy text accessibility guide goes through the reasons. For line-drawing characters that are easier to use, see line symbols, and for the other faces, see the text faces hub and kaomoji.