The most-copied cat face on the internet contains no Japanese at all. ฅ՞•ﻌ•՞ฅ is built from a retired Thai letter, an Armenian question mark and an Arabic letter. That is normal for cat kaomoji: the cat is whatever shape fits, borrowed from any alphabet. Here are 150 cat faces to copy, what each piece really is, and the one cat face that can reorder your line.
tap one to copy it. an empty box means your device is missing a font for that character — the text still copies correctly.
150 cat faces to copy
Tap any face to copy it.
The classic and its close variants 20
The = signs are cheeks, the ^ are ears, and the middle is whatever mouth you like. Everything else on this page is a variation on that skeleton.
Cats with paws 20
ฅ on both sides is the standard paw. It is the single most recognisable piece of a cat kaomoji and, as the next section explains, it is not a paw at all.
Sleeping and loafing cats 20
ᓚᘏᗢ is the famous one — a cat lying down, seen from the side. Three characters, no brackets, no eyes.
Cats doing something 20
Cat emoji, for comparison 14
These are emoji, not kaomoji: one character each, a fixed colour, a fixed size, and blocked by every field that rejects emoji. Use them when you want the picture to be obvious at a glance; use the faces above when you want the cat to sit inside a sentence and take the colour of the text around it.
Note 🐈⬛, the black cat: it is not its own character but a joined sequence — cat plus a black square, stitched with an invisible joiner. On a device that does not know the sequence it arrives as two separate emoji.
The parts on their own 20
Build your own: pick two ears, two eyes and a mouth.
Sulking and smug cats 12
Cats are good at both. The shape stays the same and only the eyes and mouth change.
Shy and curious cats 12
Peeking, hiding and looking sideways.
Sleepy and cosy cats 12
Napping variants that are not already in the loafing list above.
What a cat kaomoji is actually made of
Kaomoji are called Japanese text faces, and the format is Japanese — read straight on, no head-tilting. The characters are borrowed from everywhere. Here is what the cat is really wearing:
| Piece | Code | Official name | What it really is |
|---|---|---|---|
| U+0E05 | Thai Character Kho Khon | A retired letter of the Thai alphabet. Thai has two obsolete consonants, and this is one of them — it fell out of use in the 20th century. Being a cat paw is more or less the only job it has left. | |
| U+14DA, U+160F, U+15E2 | Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics | ᘏ and ᗢ are Carrier syllables — from Dakelh, spoken in British Columbia. The sleeping cat ᓚᘏᗢ is written in an Indigenous Canadian script. | |
| U+FECC | Arabic Letter Ain, medial form | Not a decoration: it is the letter ع as it looks in the middle of a word. See the warning below — this one has a side effect. | |
| U+055E | Armenian Question Mark | Armenian puts its question mark above a letter rather than at the end of the sentence. Here it is a pointed ear. | |
| U+03C9 | Greek Small Letter Omega | The classic cat mouth. Chosen purely for the shape. | |
| U+2A4A | Union Beside And Joined With Union | A set-theory operator. As a cat mouth it is an open, happy one. | |
| U+227D, U+227C | Succeeds / Precedes Or Equal To | Two more maths operators, used as the cat’s shoulders in ≽^•⩊•^≼. | |
| U+1D25 | Latin Letter Ain | A phonetic-alphabet letter. Snout for cats, bears and dogs alike. |
None of this is a mistake by whoever built the faces. It is how kaomoji have always worked: someone scrolls a character table until a shape looks right, and the meaning of the character is irrelevant. That is also why the same face can be impossible to type and trivial to copy.
The cat face that can reorder your line
This one is worth knowing before you paste it into a bio. The mouth ﻌ in ฅ՞•ﻌ•՞ฅ is an Arabic letter, and Arabic runs right to left. In Unicode terms it carries the direction class AL, and that class does not just affect the letter itself: it can flip the order of neutral characters — brackets, dashes, digits — that sit next to it.
What that looks like in practice:
- In a plain sentence, usually nothing happens. Surrounded by ordinary left-to-right letters, the run is short enough that the layout stays put.
- Next to numbers or punctuation, things can move. A phone number, a date or a bracketed word placed right after the face may render in an order you did not type — and it will look different again on the reader’s device.
- In a display name, it can leak. Some apps lay out the whole name field as one run. One right-to-left character in the middle can drag a trailing symbol to the wrong end of the name.
The fix is easy: if you want that exact cat, put it at the end of the line with nothing after it, or swap the mouth for a left-to-right one — ω, ⩊ or ᴥ all look similar and none of them carries direction. The faces in the “classic” group above are all safe in this respect.
Build your own cat in five slots
Every face in the first group is the same five slots filled differently. Once you see the slots you stop copying and start writing.
| Slot | Options | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Cheeks | = … = |
The outer frame. Two equals signs are the standard; brackets ( ) work too, and ﾐ ﾐ gives a fluffier outline. |
| 2 · Ears | ^ … ^ |
Pointed ears. ՞ ՞ is a rounder pair, ˄ ˄ a smaller one. |
| 3 · Eyes | ･ ･ / ◕ ◕ / ˘ ˘ / ✧ ✧ | Dots for neutral, circles for wide awake, curves for asleep, sparkles for delighted. |
| 4 · Mouth | ω / ⩊ / ᴥ / ‥ / ᆺ | ω is the default. ⩊ is open and happy, ᴥ is a snout, ‥ is barely there. |
| 5 · Paws | ฅ … ฅ | Optional, and they go outside everything else. |
Worked example, adding one slot at a time: (=^^=) → (=^･^=) → (=^･ω･^=) → ฅ(=^･ω･^=)ฅ. Same cat, four sizes. Keep the short one for fields with a character limit and the long one for chat.
Two rules that keep a home-made face readable. Symmetry first: whatever you put on the left has to appear mirrored on the right, or the face reads as a typo rather than a cat. Nothing taller than the line: characters with marks above or below them (like the ⌯͒ in some elaborate faces) push the line height around and make a paragraph look broken.
Which cat to send when
Cat faces are not interchangeable. The differences are small on screen and large in tone.
| Face | Tone | When it lands |
|---|---|---|
| (=^･ω･^=) | Neutral friendly | The all-purpose one. Says hello, says thanks, ends a sentence without adding weight. |
| ฅ(≧ω≦)ฅ | Excited | Squeezed-shut eyes plus paws. For good news that is not your own. |
| ᓚᘏᗢ | Tired, or done for the day | No eyes, no face, just a shape lying down. Reads as affectionate exhaustion. |
| (=；ω；=) | Upset but not seriously | The semicolons are tears. Small disappointments only — a real one deserves words. |
| (=╬ಠ ω ಠ=) | Mock anger | The ಠ eyes make it theatrical, which is what stops it reading as actual anger. |
| (=˘ω˘=) | Content, sleepy | Closed curved eyes. The right ending for a good-night message. |
| ₍˄·͈༝·͈˄₎ | Small and uncertain | Tiny, no cheeks, no paws. Reads as shy rather than happy. |
The one that gets misread most often is (=╬ಠ ω ಠ=). If the person cannot see the ಠ properly — and on a device missing the Kannada font they will see boxes — what arrives is a face with two empty squares for eyes, which reads as nothing at all rather than as a joke.
Which of these will turn into boxes
Every character in a kaomoji has to exist in a font on the reader’s device. Cat faces are unusually exposed here, because they lean on scripts that most phones ship only partially. Ranked by risk:
| Characters | Script | Risk |
|---|---|---|
| ᓚᘏᗢ ᐡ ᐢ ᕬ | Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics | Highest risk. Widely present on desktop, patchy on older Android. The sleeping cat is the most likely face on this page to arrive as three empty boxes. |
| ฅ | Thai | Low risk. Thai ships almost everywhere, including the obsolete letters. |
| ﻌ ՞ | Arabic, Armenian | Low risk for display — but see the direction warning above, which is a separate problem from boxes. |
| ω ⩊ ≽ ≼ ᴥ | Greek, maths, phonetic Latin | Lowest risk. These are in every standard font set. |
| ･ ｪ ﾉ ㅅ | Katakana, Hangul | Low risk. CJK and Korean coverage is close to universal now. |
The test that costs nothing: send the face to one person on a different operating system before you put it anywhere permanent. If it survives an Android-to-iPhone trip, it will survive most things.
Where cat faces work, and where they do not
| Where | What works | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Chat and comments | Everything | No limits. This is what kaomoji were built for. |
| Display name | Most of them | Long faces get cut off. Keep it under about ten characters — (=^･^=) fits, ฅ(⌯͒•̩̩̥·̆▾·̆•̩̩̥⌯͒)ฅ does not. |
| @username | None | Username fields accept letters, digits, dots and underscores. No kaomoji of any kind. |
| Game nicknames | Depends, and usually not | Most games reject anything outside a short allow-list. Try (=^^=) first — it uses only characters that games tend to permit. |
| Documents and email | Yes | They are text, so they take the font and colour of the paragraph around them. |
| File names | Avoid | Works locally, breaks on upload to many servers. |
One habit that saves trouble: keep the short version and the long version of your favourite face. The long one for chat, the short one for every field with a limit. For a cat, (=^･ω･^=) and (=^^=) are the same face at two sizes.
Frequently asked questions
What is the cat kaomoji called?
There is no single name. In Japanese they are 顔文字 (kaomoji, literally “face characters”); the cat ones are just cat kaomoji or neko kaomoji. ᓚᘏᗢ is sometimes called the sleeping cat or the loaf cat.
What is ฅ?
A retired letter of the Thai alphabet, U+0E05 Kho Khon. Thai stopped using it in the 20th century; on the internet it is a cat paw and almost nothing else.
How do I type a cat kaomoji?
Realistically, you copy it. The characters come from five or six different scripts and no keyboard has them together. On Windows the emoji panel (Win + .) has a kaomoji tab with a small selection; everything beyond that has to be pasted.
Why does ᓚᘏᗢ show as boxes on my phone?
Because your device is missing the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics font. It is not a broken face — it is a missing font, and it is the most common failure on this page. Use (=˘ω˘=) instead if you need a sleeping cat that always renders.
Is ฅ՞•ﻌ•՞ฅ safe to use in a bio?
Yes, with one precaution: put it at the end of the line. The ﻌ is an Arabic letter and runs right to left, which can reorder punctuation and numbers placed after it.
What is the difference between a cat kaomoji and 🐱?
🐱 is an emoji: one character, fixed colour, fixed size, blocked by fields that reject emoji. A cat kaomoji is ordinary text — it takes the colour and size of the text around it and gets through many fields where emoji do not.
Back to the full FancyMoji kaomoji library, or see more faces: cute kaomoji, sad and crying kaomoji, the look of disapproval ಠ_ಠ, Lenny face, the shrug and table flip. If you are new to all of this, start with what a kaomoji is and how it differs from an emoji.
