Lenny Face Generator

What the Lenny face generator does

You want a Lenny face. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) Or a shrug, or a table flip, or a disapproving stare to drop into a chat.

This gives you one. Copy it and it goes anywhere text goes.

Then read the rest, because there is a 2007 psychology paper that explains why these look the way they do, and there is a fact about how they are built that I have never got over.

How to use it

Choose a number, press Generate, and press Copy to paste one wherever you were headed.

Why the eyes are doing all the work

Look at ಠ_ಠ.

You know exactly what that face is doing. It is judging you. And notice how it is judging you: the mouth is a flat line. A single underscore. It is not doing anything at all. Every bit of the disapproval is in the eyes.

Now look at a Western smiley. :-) and :-( are the same face. Same eyes, same nose. The only thing that changed is the mouth.

That is not a coincidence, and somebody proved it.

In 2007, Masaki Yuki at Hokkaido University, with William Maddux and Takahiko Masuda, published a paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology called Are the windows to the soul the same in the East and West? Yuki said the idea came from his own life. He had spent his childhood puzzled by American smiles, which struck him as enormous, all open mouth and hauled up corners, nothing like the smiles he knew.

Their reasoning ran like this. Your mouth is easy to control. You can put a smile on it deliberately, right now, and hold it. Your eyes are much harder to fake. So in a culture where damping your feelings down is the polite default, people would learn to read the part of the face that cannot lie. And in a culture where broadcasting your feelings is normal, people would read the part that is doing the broadcasting.

They tested it, and the first thing they tested was emoticons. Then real faces. It held.

Japanese readers took their cue from the eyes. American readers took it from the mouth. Later eye tracking work found Eastern viewers did not settle on the mouth even for a plainly happy face, and a follow up with Dutch participants got the same split, so it is not an American quirk.

And the emoticons had been telling on everybody the whole time. Japanese happy is (^_^) and Japanese sad is (;_;). The mouth never moved. American happy is :-) and American sad is :-(. The eyes never moved.

Two continents drew faces out of punctuation, nobody coordinated, and each one quietly encoded which half of a face it trusts.

So now go back up and read the list on this page again. Every one of them is upright. Every one of them varies the eyes. You have been reading Japanese emotional grammar this whole time and nobody mentioned it.

A Finnish message board, November 2012

Lenny himself has a birthday, which is unusual. Most internet things do not.

On the 18th of November 2012, on the international board of Ylilauta, a Finnish image board, an anonymous user posted ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) into a thread. Nothing about the moment was significant. It was a message board, in Finnish, about nothing.

Within days it was on 4chan. Then Reddit. Then everywhere.

The name is not an acronym and does not stand for anything. Ylilauta lore says a user called Lenny pushed it, and the name stuck to the face, and that is the entire origin story. There is no deeper meaning. It is held up by momentum and nothing else.

What made it work is that it is unreadable in a useful way. That face is not happy, not sad, not angry. It is knowing. It suggests that something was implied without ever saying what, which makes it perfect for innuendo, because the person who has to decide what was meant is the reader, not you.

The disapproval face is older and came the other way round. ಠ_ಠ turned up on 4chan around 2007 and detonated on Reddit. It got a boost from an unlikely direction: when Apple shipped Mac OS X Lion in 2011 with Kannada font support, a large chunk of the internet could suddenly see it properly for the first time. A meme spread because an operating system added support for a South Indian language.

A face cut out of other people's alphabets

Now the thing I actually want you to know.

Those disapproving eyes, ಠ, are not a symbol. Not a shape somebody drew. It is a letter.

It is ttha, from the Kannada script. Kannada is a Dravidian language spoken by tens of millions of people in Karnataka, in southwest India. It has a literature going back more than a thousand years. And ಠ is one of its consonants, a retroflex sound made with your tongue curled back, sitting quietly inside real words in a real language that real people are writing in right now.

Someone on 4chan looked at a letter of the Kannada alphabet and thought: that is an eye.

And it does not stop there. Look at the arms on ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ. Those brackets are ༼ and ༽, Tibetan punctuation marks. That is script used for Buddhist texts. Those are the arms.

The hand on (づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ is づ, a Japanese hiragana character. It is the syllable zu. It is a letter Japanese children learn in primary school. Here it is a hand offering a hug.

The mouth on Lenny is ʖ, which comes out of the International Phonetic Alphabet, the notation linguists use to write down the actual sounds of human speech. It marks a glottal stop. It exists so that a researcher can transcribe a language accurately in a field notebook.

And the brows are made with a combining double inverted breve, a mark phoneticians use to tie two sounds together and show they are pronounced as one.

The wall in ┬┴┬┴┤ ͜ʖ ͡°) ├┬┴┬┴ is made of box drawing characters, which exist because in the nineteen eighties a terminal that could only print text still needed to draw a box.

So put it together. A Lenny face is a ransom note. Every piece was cut out of somewhere else: an Indian alphabet, Tibetan punctuation, Japanese syllabary, linguists' notation, dead terminal graphics. Every single one of those characters was designed with enormous care so that somebody could write their own language down properly, and got kidnapped by a message board to make a face that means I am implying something.

Unicode set out to hold every writing system humanity has ever produced, so that nobody's language would be locked out of a computer ever again. It is one of the great cooperative projects of the last fifty years.

And we used it to build a smirk.

I do not think that is a criticism, incidentally. There is something wonderful about it. To make one of these faces you have to reach into half the world's scripts at once, and it only works because a committee spent decades making sure a Kannada letter and a Tibetan mark and a phonetician's tie bar could all sit in the same line of text and get along.

Taking a Lenny face apart

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

The brackets are just brackets. That is the head.

Each eye is two characters stacked. There is a degree sign, the little circle you use for temperature, and sitting on top of it is a combining mark. Combining marks are the ones that do not stand on their own. They land on whatever came before them. That is how accents work: the mark for an acute accent is not part of the letter e, it is a separate character that jumps onto it.

So the brow is not attached to the eye. It is a separate character that has been told to lie down on top of one.

The mouth is the same trick, upside down. A glottal stop letter with a combining mark that sits under things instead of over them.

Which means Lenny is not a picture and not a character. It is a small stack of instructions to a text renderer, and your browser is assembling him from parts every single time you look at him.

Once you can see that, the variants stop being mysterious. Swap the eyes for ಠ and Lenny has seen some things. Swap the mouth and he is confused. Put box drawing characters on either side and he is hiding behind a wall. The face is modular because the writing system is modular.

Why these outlive emoji

An emoji is a number that your device looks up in a font. Different font, different picture. Newer emoji, older phone, empty box. You are always at the mercy of whoever drew the set.

These are not that. These are letters. Ordinary text, made of characters that have been in every font on earth for years, because they had to be, because people write Kannada and Tibetan and Japanese.

So a Lenny face renders the same on your phone, a friend's phone, a Discord server, a Twitch chat, an email, a terminal window. It goes through systems that have never heard of emoji and comes out the other side intact. It will still work on hardware that has not been invented yet, and it worked on hardware that has been in a skip for a decade.

There is a reason the shrug refuses to die. It is not fashion. It is that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is more portable than anything Unicode has approved since.

How a face gets picked

Nothing clever.

The faces come from a hand-built list, each one checked before it went in. Press Generate and you get a random draw from it, with no repeats inside a batch.

The whole thing stays on your device, and none of your input goes out.

Using one without embarrassing yourself

One is a joke. Three is a personality. Lenny works on timing. Dropped once, at the right moment, he does the whole job. Used in every message he stops meaning anything and starts meaning that you have a Lenny habit.

He is not innocent. Lenny reads as innuendo to most of the internet. That is what he is for. Putting him in a work message because you thought he looked friendly is a specific kind of mistake, and somebody will have to explain it to you.

Match the face to the room. ಠ_ಠ is dry disapproval and lands almost anywhere. The table flip is comic rage and needs an audience that knows the bit. The shrug is universal. Lenny is not.

Watch the escaping. The shrug contains a backslash, and a fair number of chat apps will eat it. If yours comes out as ¯_(ツ)_/¯ with a limb missing, that is what happened, and you need a second backslash.

They are text, so they go in a name field. That is the party trick emoji cannot do reliably. A Lenny face will sit in a username, a channel title, a commit message, a spreadsheet cell, anywhere that accepts letters, because as far as the computer is concerned that is all he is.

Questions people ask

What does ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) actually mean?

That something was implied and you are not going to say what. That is the whole function. The ambiguity is not a bug in the face, it is the entire point of it, which is why it ended up attached to innuendo.

Why is it called Lenny?

Because a user on the board where it appeared was called Lenny. There is no better answer. Internet names stick for no reason and then last forever.

Are these emoji?

No, and that is why they work everywhere. Emoji are pictures your device draws from a font. These are made of ordinary letters and marks, so they survive anywhere text survives.

Why does one show up as boxes for my friend?

Their device is missing the font for whatever script that character came from. It is rare now, but it does happen with the more obscure ones. The old faithful shrug is built from characters that everything on earth has, which is why it never breaks.

Can I type one myself?

You can, and it is horrible. You are stacking combining marks in a specific order and there is no visual feedback until it is right. This is why everyone copies. Keep the ones you like in a note or a clipboard manager.

Is ಠ really a letter?

Yes. It is a consonant in the Kannada script, and tens of millions of people in India use it to write their language every day. It became a disapproving eye on the internet entirely by accident, and Kannada carried on without noticing.

References

1. Yuki, M., Maddux, W. W. and Masuda, T. (2007). Are the windows to the soul the same in the East and West? Cultural differences in using the eyes and mouth as cues to recognize emotions in Japan and the United States. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43(2), 303 to 311. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2006.02.004
2. Culture Is Key To Interpreting Facial Emotions. University of Alberta, ScienceDaily, 5 April 2007. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070404162321.htm
3. Yamamoto et al. Japanese See the Eyes and Dutch the Mouth of Emoticons. Letters on Evolutionary Behavioral Science, 11(2), 40 to 45. https://lebs.hbesj.org/index.php/lebs/article/download/lebs.2020.80/283/
4. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) / Lenny Face. Know Your Meme. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/%CD%A1-%CD%9C%CA%96-%CD%A1-lenny-face
5. Kannada letter ttha, U+0CA0. https://unicode-explorer.com/c/0CA0