Happy eyes ^^
^^ and ^_^ are smiling faces drawn with the eyes: each caret is an eye closed in a smile, and the underscore in ^_^ is the mouth. They mean happiness, a pleased or friendly smile.
Easily confused with
How to read it
Western emoticons such as :-) lie on their side and change the mouth to change the mood. Faces like ^_^ stand upright and change the eyes. Jaram Park and colleagues, who studied emoticons in 1.1 billion tweets (ICWSM 2013), call these the vertical style, popular in Eastern countries, and the horizontal style, popular in Western ones. In their table ^^ is the standard vertical form for “happy”, with variants such as (^^) and ^.^, while T T is sad. ^^ was the only vertical emoticon among the ten most used in their data. Dictionary.com describes kaomoji as “a popular Japanese style of emoticons”, and Kyle Chayka of The Awl translates the word as “face mark”.
Also searched as: ^_^, ^^ meaning.
Look-alikes
The eyes are carets, the keyboard character that Unicode names CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT; on its own the caret is a proofreading mark and a power sign.
More emoticons
Browse symbols drawn with lines.
Sources
- Emoticon Style: Interpreting Differences in Emoticons Across Cultures, Jaram Park, Vladimir Barash, Clay Fink and Meeyoung Cha, Proceedings of ICWSM 7 (2013), 466–475, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Introduction; Table 2; Results
- Culture Is Key To Interpreting Facial Emotions, News release, 5 April 2007, on Yuki, Maddux and Masuda (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2007), University of Alberta, via ScienceDaily, Release text
- The Life and Times of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, Kyle Chayka, 20 May 2014, The Awl, Article text
- <3 (Dictionary.com Emoji Dictionary), Dictionary.com Emoji Dictionary, 25 April 2018, Dictionary.com, Entry text
- C0 Controls and Basic Latin: Range 0000–007F (code chart), The Unicode Standard, Version 18.0, Unicode Consortium, Basic Latin, 005E
Last reviewed October 1, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research