The internet's smuggest face in every version — the original ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°), expressive remixes, and Lennys with arms, from flexing to table-flipping. Each face is one complete string with all its combining marks, so a single click copies it intact.
The original Lenny and close relatives that swap the eyes. The face stays smug; only the stare changes.
Lennys that break character — frowning, staring, weeping, or falling in love while staying unmistakably Lenny.
Full-body Lennys — waving, flexing, shrugging, and flipping tables. The longer the string, the more satisfying the paste.
Click any character to copy it, or use the section buttons to copy groups.
The Lenny face first appeared in November 2012 on Ylilauta, a Finnish imageboard, in a thread where moderators were sweeping out spam — a user posted the face with the caption 'RIP in peace' and others adopted it on the spot. Screenshots jumped to 4chan and Reddit within days, someone christened it 'Le Lenny Face', and it settled into its permanent job: signalling smug insinuation, the face you deploy when a sentence has a second meaning. Reddit communities spammed it in threads, gaming chats adopted it as a taunt, and more than a decade later it remains the default plain-text way of saying you know exactly what you are doing.
Lenny is a small feat of Unicode abuse. The eyes are ordinary degree signs (°), but they float strangely because of the marks beside them: ◌͡ is the combining double inverted breve and ◌͜ the combining double breve below, characters from the Combining Diacritical Marks block that linguists use to tie two letters together in phonetic transcription. The nose, ʖ, is a genuine letter — the inverted glottal stop from the International Phonetic Alphabet, used in the transcription of click consonants. None of these were designed to sit in a smiley, which is exactly why the face looks like nothing else — and why it needs those invisible-looking marks to hold its expression together.
Because it leans on combining marks, Lenny renders differently from font to font. Some apps stack the little breves neatly beside the eyes; others shift them onto the parentheses or draw them too high, which is why the face occasionally looks broken in terminal windows, spreadsheets, and older Android keyboards. There is no fix beyond the font itself — the characters are correct, the rendering is not. It also means Lenny is longer than it looks: the classic face is eleven code points, so character-limited fields count it accordingly, and deleting it with backspace takes several presses as the marks come off one at a time. Copying from this page always gives you the complete, correctly ordered sequence.
Smugness with plausible deniability. Posting ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) signals that a statement carries an insinuation, a double meaning, or mischief the writer refuses to spell out. It ranges from flirtatious to trollish depending on context, and in gaming chats it doubles as a taunt after a lucky or undeserved victory.
It was first posted in November 2012 on the Finnish imageboard Ylilauta, in a thread mocking a moderation sweep. Screenshots reached 4chan and Reddit within days, where it was named 'Le Lenny Face' and spammed into ubiquity. The name stuck even though the original post never called it anything at all.
The face depends on combining diacritical marks — characters that attach to whatever precedes them. Fonts disagree about how to position marks on spaces and parentheses, so some apps draw the little brows floating in the wrong spot or too far up. Nothing is missing from your copy; the same string renders perfectly in a font with better combining-mark support.
Eleven code points, though it looks like seven or eight visible characters: two parentheses, three spaces, two degree-sign eyes, the ʖ nose, and three combining marks that render as the brows and smile. Character-limited fields count all eleven, and backspacing through the face takes extra presses because the marks delete one at a time.
Often, but not everywhere. Discord display names, Steam names, and most game lobbies accept the full face. Fields restricted to letters and numbers reject the parentheses and ʖ, and some platforms silently strip the combining marks, leaving ( ° ʖ °) — a haunting, browless Lenny. If that happens, the field simply does not allow the marks.