Last checked by the TextEditor.com team
What is the shrug made of?
The shrug uses nine characters. Two of them, the hands and the face, are not on a normal English keyboard.
Why does the shrug lose its arm?
Reddit, Discord and many forums use Markdown, a set of shortcuts for bold and italic text. In Markdown a backslash means "show the next character as it is". So the app reads \_ as a plain underscore and throws the backslash away. Your shrug loses its left arm.
You type: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Reddit shows: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
You type: ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ Reddit shows: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The fix adds a backslash before each backslash and each underscore. The "Reddit and Discord" button above and the "Copy for Discord and Reddit" box on the grid do this for you.
Slack has its own fix. Type /shrug and Slack adds ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ to the end of your message. You can read this in Slack's list of built in commands.
Is ツ really a smile?
No. ツ is "tsu", a letter of the Japanese katakana alphabet. It just happens to look like a face with closed eyes and a smile. Two other katakana letters look almost the same.
| Letter | Code | Name | How to tell |
|---|---|---|---|
| ツ | U+30C4 | Tsu | The two short strokes sit at the top |
| シ | U+30B7 | Shi | The two short strokes sit on the left side |
| ッ | U+30C3 | Small tsu | A smaller ツ that marks a short pause |
Shrug text or shrug emoji?
Unicode added the 🤷 person shrugging emoji in 2016, with skin tones and man and woman versions. Both mean the same thing. The shrug article on Wikipedia covers the gesture itself and where it shows up in culture.
| ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ | 🤷 | |
|---|---|---|
| Characters | 9 | 1 (up to 5 with skin tone and gender) |
| Looks the same everywhere | Almost, it is plain text | No, each phone draws its own |
| Can break | In Markdown apps, it loses an arm | On old phones, it shows a box |
You can copy 🤷 and its other versions on the people emoji page.