Shrug ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

How to read it

It is built from ordinary characters: a macron ¯ for each raised hand, a backslash and underscore for one arm, the face in brackets, and an underscore and slash for the other arm. Emojipedia calls it the shruggie and points out that it is not an emoji but a string of Unicode characters. The face is ツ, which Unicode names KATAKANA LETTER TU and also TSU (U+30C4), an ordinary letter of the Japanese syllabary. Kyle Chayka, writing in The Awl in 2014, classed the shrug as a kaomoji, Japanese for “face mark”, a kind of emoticon that borrows katakana characters for a wider range of expression. The readings he collected run from “lol idk” to a Reuters editor’s “there is outrage on the Internet, but I just can’t today”, and, for the real-life gesture, a good-humoured admission that things happen and nothing can be done about them.

Also searched as: shrug emoji, shrug emoticon, shruggie, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

The shrug emoji 🤷

The emoji is a separate, single character, U+1F937, which Unicode names SHRUG; its emoji name is person shrugging. Emojipedia says it was approved in Unicode 9.0 in 2016, and that it shows a person with raised shoulders and, on some platforms, raised arms and flat hands. The meaning is the same: a lack of knowledge, or not caring how something turns out.