character symbols that looks like a face looking to the side

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) / Lenny Face

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About

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) is an emoticon created with unicode character symbols. The face is often used to spam forums and image boards, similar to the Japanese word "desu". On 4chan, it has also come to be known as "Le Lenny Face" or "Le Face Face."

Origin

One of the earliest appearances of the emoticon was posted to the Finnish image board Ylilauta[21] at 8:45 a.m. EST on November 18th, 2012. Posted on the site's International board, "( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)" was used as a comment in a thread about whether or not administrators should change the settings on their spam detector. After someone complained about seeing too many posts in stickied threads, an anonymous user used the emoticon and the phrase "this thread is leaking from the heavens." Other users began derailing the thread by posting derivatives of the emoticon with different types of eyes, which continued for three days.


Orgin and first known use of Lenny Face

Spread

By 11 a.m. (ET) that same day, the face had been posted to 4chan's /v/[8] (video games) board, followed by similar posts on /sp/[7] (sports) and /b/[9], where numerous users were eventually banned (shown below, right) for spamming the boards with the emoticon. A screenshot of these bans was also shared on FunnyJunk[6], where it earned 3900 points and gained more than 101,000 views.


4chan bans a user for using too much Lenny Face

Redditor Dogcatcher1979 submitted a post titled "So I guess this is a thing now?" to the /r/4chan[2] subreddit at approximately 3 p.m. EST, which included a screenshot of the face being used in a 4chan thread (shown below, right). In the post, Redditor 8-bit_d-boy commented that the face resembled the children's television show character Bob the Builder. By 4 p.m. EST, 4chan users had raided the /r/Israel[4] subreddit (shown below, left), with some users referring to the emoticon as "le Palestine face."


Lenny Face evolving on 4chan, growing into a meme of its own Lenny face starts to be used to flood the Israel subreddit page

Also on November 18th, World of Warcraft Forums[5] member Kuallius submitted a post titled "The Sha of Casuals ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)" and YouTuber cubegoat uploaded a video titled "( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)" (shown below, left). On the following day, cubegoat uploaded another video titled "Fresh ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) of /b/el Air," featuring various animated versions of the emoticon accompanied by the theme song for the 1990's sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (shown below, right). As of November 29th, there are more than 1450 search results for "( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)" on YouTube.[20]



Over the next several days, various threads with the emoticon popped up on HUPIT Gaming[12], Tech N9ne[13], gun enthusiast forum AR15[14], the IGN Forums[15] and the Facepunch forums[16], among others. Additional mentions were found on Tumblr[11][17], Twitter[18] and Yahoo! Answers.[19] As of November 29th, 2012, there are more than 150 Facebook pages containing “( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)” in the title on Facebook.[1] The largest of these fan pages was created on November 18th and has 4120 likes.[10]

Details

The following table shows, in order, which characters are used in ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).

Code Point (Base 16) Name Chart
28 left parenthesis Basic Latin (ASCII)[35]
20 space Basic Latin (ASCII)[35]
361 combining double inverted breve Combining Diacritical Marks[38]
B0 degree sign Latin-1 Supplement[36]
20 space Basic Latin (ASCII)[35]
35C combining double breve below Combining Diacritical Marks[38]
296 Latin letter inverted glottal stop IPA Extensions[37]
20 space Basic Latin (ASCII)[35]
361 combining double inverted breve Combining Diacritical Marks[38]
B0 degree sign Latin-1 Extensions[36]
29 right parenthesis Basic Latin (ASCII)[35]

Derivative: ( ‾ʖ̫‾)

In April 2013, 4chan's /b/ (random) board reportedly became flooded with an emoticon bearing a marked resemblance to the "lenny face." Denoted as "( ‾ʖ̫‾)," the emoticon was defined as the Keep Calm and Carry On face by the online emoji dictionary site Emojicons[22] on April 19th, followed by similar strings of mentions on Tumblr[24], Facebook[23], Steam and several imageboard and forum communities.[25][28] However, it should be noted that the emoticon had been circulating among Japanese Twitter users[26] prior to its introduction on the English-speaking web.


Lenny Face evolves into similar emoticon with closed eyes, called Keep Calm and Carry On, which was also used in Japan previously

DegDeg

On June 10th, 2013, Tumblr user Franklenlobo[34] blogged that his computer's text-to-speech program pronounced the "( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)" emoticon as "deg deg." Within the following five weeks, the post accumulated upwards of 112,000 notes.


post on Tumblr in which someone points out that their text to speech read the Lenny Face as Deg Deg

The likely cause of this was that this user's text-to-speech software only tried to pronounce the degree characters and nothing else, either because it saw those characters as punctuation or it didn't know how to vocalize them.

On June 26th, Tumblr user Cynical-Seadragon[31] posted screenshots of the emoticon made out of building blocks in the indie sandbox game Minecraft, captioned with the keyword “degdeg” (shown below, left). On July 13th, Tumblr user TakeFlightLittleBird[32] posted a collage of the emoticon in 39 different fonts (shown below, right), gaining over 18,700 notes in the first four days.


Minecraft version of Lenny Face as seen from above Lenny Face in 39 different fonts

On July 15th, the AnimatedText Tumblr[33] blog highlighted a rotating animated GIF featuring four copies of the emoticon posted with the tag "degdeg." Within the next 48 hours, the post garnered upwards of 1,000 notes.


degdeg gif of rotating Lenny Face

Various Examples


vertical spiral GIF of Lenny Faces Zoom in on a Peanuts comic strip and Linus has almost an exact Lenny Face lenny stage in shape of Lenny Face in Star Wars video Game Lego head of a Lenny Face Classical Art meme of a Lenny Face Meme of a girl saying boys need to look like Lenny Face to get with her Lenny Face mouse that ate a whole triangle of cheese Funny meme in which a dude responds to I Love You with a Lenny Face

Search Interest

External References

[1] Facebook – ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[2] Reddit – So I Guess This is a Thing Now

[3] Reddit – ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[4] Reddit – /r/Israel post

[5] World of Warcraft (via Wayback Machine) – The Sha of Casuals

[6] FunnyJunk – ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) Ban

[7] Foolz – /sp/ Thread

[8] Foolz – /v/ Thread

[9] WebCite – /b/ Thread

[10] Facebook – ( ͡º ͜ʖ ͡º)

[11] Tumblr – Posts tagged "( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) "

[12] HUPIT Gaming (via Wayback Machine) – ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)this is the best epic meme in a while( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[13] Tech N9ne (via Wayback Machine) – ( ͡ ° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[14] AR15 – ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[15] IGN Forums – This face ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) ruined my life.

[16] Facepunch (via Wayback Machine) – (° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[17] Tumblr – Posts tagged ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[18] Twitter – Search results for ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[19] Yahoo! Answers – Search results for "( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)"

[20] YouTube – Search results for "( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)"

[21] Ylilauta – /int/ specific spam detector vote Post #14637572

[22] Emojicons – Keep Calm and Carry On

[23] Facebook – By the power of 4chan

[24] Tumblr – ( ‾ʖ̫‾)

[25] Naruto Board – ( ‾ʖ̫‾)

[26] Twitter – Search Results for

[27] Facebook – Le Lenny Face

[28] Wykop.pl – ( ‾ʖ̫‾)

[29] Ylilauta – /int/

[30] Tumblr – Degdeg (page unavailable)

[31] Tumblr – cynical seadragon degdeg (page unavailable)

[32] Tumblr – TakeFlightLittleBird

[33] Tumblr – AnimatedText

[34] Tumblr (via Wayback Machine) – franklenlobo

[35] Unicode – Basic Latin

[36] Unicode – Latin-1 Supplement

[37] Unicode – IPA Extensions

[38] Unicode – Combining Diacritical Marks

Recent Videos 168 total

Recent Images 168 total


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            ⊂  つ
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