The best known crying face, (ಥ﹏ಥ), borrows its eyes from the alphabet of a South Indian language.
The parts of (ಥ﹏ಥ)
ಥU+0CA5Kannada letter tha. The round top is the eye, the hook below is the tear.
﹏U+FE4FWavy low line. It looks like a shaky mouth.
Its cousin ಠ, from the same script, makes the dry staring eyes of ಠ_ಠ. Add the tear hook and the stare turns into crying.
The loud sob: (;´༎ຶД༎ຶ`)
This face looks like someone crying so hard the tears stream down. Each eye is two characters stacked into one.
The parts of the sobbing eye and mouth
༎U+0F0ETibetan mark nyis shad, a punctuation mark from the Tibetan script. The two lines are the tears.
◌ຶU+0EB6Lao vowel sign y. In Lao it sits above a letter. Here it sits on top of ༎ as the eye.
ДU+0414Cyrillic capital de, a Russian letter. It is the wide open, wailing mouth.
Because the Lao sign has to sit on another character, some apps place it badly. If the eye looks broken, the app's font is missing one of the two parts.
T_T and ;_;, the keyboard classics
You can type these two on any keyboard. In T_T the top bar of each T is a closed eye and the long stem is a stream of tears. In ;_; the dot is the eye and the comma under it is a single tear. Fancier faces like ╥﹏╥ do the same thing with box drawing lines.
Tears of joy or tears of pain?
Text faces and emoji split crying the same way: some tears are happy and some are not.
Feeling
Text face
Emoji
Use it for
Tears of joy
͡ಥ ͜ʖ ͡ಥ
😂
Laughing so hard you cry, or being touched.
Real crying
(ಥ﹏ಥ)
😭
Sadness, or being overwhelmed in a good or bad way.
Both emoji were added to Unicode in 2010. The face with tears of joy was even named Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionaries in 2015.
Type T_T or ;_;. Both use only keys that every keyboard has. For a fancier one, copy (ಥ﹏ಥ) from this page.
What does ಥ_ಥ mean?
It means crying or being close to tears. The eyes are the Kannada letter ಥ, whose hook looks like a tear running down.
What is the ;_; face?
A crying face made from two semicolons and an underscore. The dots are eyes, the commas under them are tears and the underscore is a flat, sad mouth.
Why do some crying faces look messy in my app?
Faces like (;´༎ຶД༎ຶ`) stack a mark on top of another character. If the font can't place the mark, it floats to the side or overlaps other text. Short faces like ╥﹏╥ have no stacked marks and stay clean.
Is a crying text face the same as 😭?
No. 😭 is an emoji that your phone draws as a picture. A text face is built from plain letters, so it takes the font and color of your text.
