Shrug Emoji Copy and Paste

This is the fastest way to copy and paste the shrug emoji ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Tap the big shrug to copy the classic version, or pick any variant from the grid — happy, confused, magical, Unicode 🤷, and more. Every one copies with a single click, then paste with Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on Mac).

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ looks like one glyph but it's nine separate Unicode characters, mixing Latin punctuation with a single Japanese katakana letter:

The text shrug is plain Unicode, so it pastes almost everywhere — but a few apps treat the backslashes specially. How ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ behaves when pasted as-is:

Paste the text shrug when you need portable plain text — terminals, code reviews, retro forums. Its glyph shape and spacing can still vary by font. Paste the graphic 🤷 emoji when you want a colorful, expressive icon and don't mind that Apple, Google and Microsoft each draw it differently. In Markdown apps, wrap ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ in backticks if a backslash disappears.

The classic isn't the only shrug — swap the face or the arm style for a different mood:

Because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ mixes Latin punctuation with a Japanese katakana character, most keyboards can't produce it directly. On a US or UK physical keyboard, the macron (¯) and the katakana ツ simply aren't mapped to any key. That's the whole reason a copy-and-paste tool like this one exists rather than everyone just typing it: copying is faster and more reliable than hunting through a special-character menu or a Unicode input method every time. If you want to type it repeatedly without returning to this page, see the full how to type the shrug emoji guide for a one-time keyboard-shortcut setup on iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows and Linux.

Because a small number of apps (mainly Markdown-based ones — see the platform table above) can silently drop a backslash, it's worth a quick glance after pasting anywhere you haven't used the shrug before. The correct shape has two arms and two underscored 'legs': ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. If you see only one backslash-arm, or the shrug looks like ¯(ツ)_/¯ with a missing limb, the app likely applied Markdown escaping — wrap it in backticks (`¯\_(ツ)_/¯`) and paste again.

Pasting ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ into a filename or a URL behaves differently from pasting it into a chat message, because filesystems and URLs don't universally accept raw Unicode the way a text field does. A filename like notes-¯\_(ツ)_/¯.txt saves fine on modern macOS, Linux and Windows (all use UTF-8-aware filesystems today), but sharing that file to an older system, a ZIP archive built with a legacy tool, or a URL slug can go wrong. In a URL specifically, browsers automatically percent-encode the non-ASCII characters — the macron and the katakana ツ each expand into a string like %C2%AF or %E3%83%84 — which is why a shrug pasted straight into an address bar turns into a long, ugly string of %XX codes rather than staying readable. If you need the shrug to show up in a link people can read, put it in the page title or a query-string label instead of the path itself, where most platforms will decode it back to the visible glyph.

This page is the canonical copy-and-paste destination for the classic shrug; a few related pages go deeper on specific angles if you need them. For the documented history of how ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ went from niche kaomoji to global shorthand, see history of the shrug emoji. For a full side-by-side of the text version against the graphic 🤷 emoji, see text shrug vs emoji shrug. And if you'd rather set up a permanent keyboard shortcut than keep returning to this page, see how to type the shrug emoji for exact steps on every major OS.