Copy and paste
Shrug Emoticon
The shrug is the most-pasted kaomoji there is, and also the one most likely to arrive at the other end with a piece missing.
It is built from four parts: two macrons for the arms, two backslash-underscore pairs for the shoulders, and ツ — the Japanese katakana "tsu" — as the face. The backslashes are what cause trouble, because several chat clients treat a backslash as an escape character and quietly swallow it.
Shrug
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Shrug escaped for Discord
¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
Shrug with a smile
¯\_(◕‿◕)_/¯
Shrug annoyed
¯\_(ಠ_ಠ)_/¯
Shrug dead inside
¯\_(x‸x)_/¯
Shrug flat
¯\_(─‿─)_/¯
Shrug smug
¯\_( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)_/¯
Shrug cat
¯\_(=^.^=)_/¯
Shrug bear
¯\_(•ᴥ•)_/¯
Half shrug
¯\_(ツ)
Other half
(ツ)_/¯
Shrug no arms
ツ
Idk shrug
idk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Shrug with hearts
¯\_(♥‿♥)_/¯
Tiny shrug
¯\(°_o)/¯
Classic ASCII shrug
\_(ツ)_/
Where these work
This page has 16 pieces: 16 single-line and 0 multi-line. The widest is 17 characters across.
Everything on this page is a single line, so there is nothing to align and nothing to break. These paste correctly into chat, bios, usernames, commit messages, spreadsheet cells and form fields alike.
Questions
Why does a backslash disappear when I paste the shrug?
Discord, Slack and a few other clients treat \ as an escape character, so it consumes the character after it and vanishes. Use the escaped version above — the one with two backslashes — and it arrives correct.
How do I make the shrug a Discord or Slack shortcut?
In Slack, Preferences → Advanced → replace text with emoji, then add a replacement mapping something like :shrug: to the escaped version. In Discord the same trick lives under Settings → Text & Images → Text Replacement on desktop.
What is the ツ character actually?
Katakana "tsu", a normal Japanese syllable. It reads as a face purely by accident of shape, which is also why it renders on every device — it is a real letter, not decoration.
Make your own
None of these say your name. The text to ASCII generator turns any word into a banner across 133 FIGlet fonts, and the image to ASCII converter turns a picture into text art in your browser. Both are free and neither uploads anything.
More text art
Table flip · Lenny face · Hands · Borders · Arrows · Stars