Click to copy the shrug emoji to paste into your documents or chats. Emoji's are just
like text characters, so that means you can adjust their sizes just like you would any
font.
We have a table of HTML entities to help you
include the shrugging emoji into your sites. We also have the
skin tone variations in a table for quick copying.
Use our tips on how to type out the emoticon in seconds.
Click to copy a shrugging emoji.
Shruging person emoji
🤷🏼
Shruging woman emoji
🤷♀️
Shrugging man emoji
🤷♂️
Or click to copy the emoticon below
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Paste the emoji into any document.use the shortcut keys: control-v (Windows), or
command-v (Mac), or right click and choose paste.
Replying with 🤷🏼 in conversationShrug Emoji Meaning
The shruging person emoji is a popular and versatile symbol that is used to convey a range
of emotions, including confusion, ignorance, and apathy. It has become an essential part
of electronic communication and is used by people all around the world to add emotional
context and express personality in their messages.
The shrugging emoji can convey multiple meanings. The emoji itself shows a shrug, which is
a physical gesture that is typically done by raising the shoulders up towards the ears and
then dropping them back down. Arms are commonly kept at the sides of the body. The gesture
is often accompanied by a facial expression that conveys a lack of knowledge or
understanding, such as a raised eyebrow or a furrowed brow. The emoji embellishes the
action by adding a head tilt and raised hands which are rotated upwards, which creates a
stronger visual impact and clarity, especially on small screens. A shrug is a gesture that
takes the place of words that have the following meanings:
Lack of knowledge, hesitation, puzzlement, doubt.
Shrugs are often used in place of the phrase “I don't know”, which is often
abbreviated as “idk”, especially during informal communications, like text messaging
or internet chat rooms. The shrug emoji is occasionally referred to as the idk emoji.
Example:
Person 1: "Hey, do you know what time the movie starts tonight?"
Person 2: "🤷🏼 I'm not sure. I think it might be at 7pm, but I'm not
positive."
Indifference, ambivalence.
Someone may respond to a shrug whe they are not particularly interested or concerned
about the issue at hand. For example, if someone shrugs in response to a question
about their plans for the weekend, and the other person responds with indifference,
they might say something like "Oh, okay", "I don't care either way", or "Whatever
works for you" without much enthusiasm. This response could be interpreted as a lack
of interest ("Meh"), lack of concern
("Oops, oh well"), or not having a strong feeling in particular about any particular
choices provided.
Example:
Person 1: "Hey, do you want pizza or tacos for dinner?"
Person 2: "🤷🏼 I don't really care either way. It's up to you."
Han Solo shrugging
Shruggie, the shrug text, emoticon/kaomoji: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
NOTE for Redditors: To copy and paste the shrug emoticon for Reddit, paste in the
following:
¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯. You'll need to add extra backslashes on the arms. These
are known as "escape characters" for
Markdown, which Reddit uses for
formatting text to create things like bolded characters or bulleted lists. The extra
backslash ensures that the shrugging emoticon's arm shows up in your Reddit comment or
post.
Before the invention of the emoji, the internet communicated with text emoticons. The
first known use of a shrug emoticon was on a bulletin board system at Carnegie Mellon
University in 1982. It was used by a user named Scott Fahlman, who suggested using :-) for jokes and :-( for serious posts, though that symbol quickly
evolved into a marker for displeasure, frustration, or anger.
The use of emoticons, widely used in online communication, began to take many forms. In
the years since, the the simple three character smiley text-based emoticons has evolved
into more complicated multi-character ASCII forms.
It's difficult to determine the exact origin of the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ emoticon, as it has been
spread widely through online communication.
Different from an emoji, an emoticon is a symbol or combination of symbols used to convey
emotion in plain-text written communication. Emoticons are often created using punctuation
marks and letters, and they are typically used in text-based communication, such as email
and instant messaging.¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is actually a combination of Unicode characters, which is a superset of ASCII.
The ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ emoticon most likely gained popularity on message boards like 4chan and
reddit around 2006. It was used as a way to express a lack of care or concern, and quickly
became popular on other forums and social media platforms like Twitter and Justin TV, which eventually became Twitch. It gained more mainstream recognition around in 2010
when it was tweeted by hip-hop group, Travis Porter, in response to
Kanye West's shrug
during 2009 Video Music Awards interruption of Taylor Swift.
The ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ emoticon is often referred to as the "shrug emoticon", or “shruggie”, and
falls under another style of emoticon called “kaomoji”. A kaomoji is a type of emoticon that originated in Japan and consists of ASCII characters. Kaomoji
are often used to convey more complex emotions and facial expressions, and they can be created
using a wider range of characters, including punctuation marks and special characters.
Other variations of the kaomoji include a "Lenny Face" or "Lenny" is a popular emoticon that is represented by combining various diacritical
marks, like this:
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).
