Person Shrugging Emoji
U+1F937:shrug:Skin tonesGender variantsAbout Person Shrugging 🤷
Person Shrugging () is part of the People & Body group in Unicode. Added in Unicode E3.0. Type on GitHub and Slack to use it. On Discord it's . Click copy above to grab it, paste it anywhere.
Works in iMessage, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, Instagram, Twitter, Gmail, and every app that supports Unicode. Pick a skin tone above to customize it.
Often associated with doubt, dunno, guess, and 10 more keywords.
Meaning varies across cultures, see cultural notes below.
Scroll down for the full story: meaning, trends, combos, and more.
How it looks
What does it mean?
Raised shoulders, palms up, head tilted. 🤷 is the universal "I don't know" or "whatever" gesture, brought to your keyboard. It expresses uncertainty, indifference, resignation, or casual dismissal. Dictionary.com nails the range: it can designate ignorance, indifference, self-acceptance, passive-aggression, annoyance, giving up, or not knowing what to make of something. That's a lot of emotional territory for one emoji. Before the official version existed, people typed ¯\\\_(ツ)\\_/¯ (the "shruggie"), a kaomoji assembled from nine characters of Japanese script and punctuation. The text version went viral in 2009 after Kanye West's Taylor Swift VMAs interruption and was so popular that Slack founder Stewart Butterfield put it in his Twitter bio. When Unicode finally made it official in June 2016, it was one of the most anticipated emojis in the batch. Even after the emoji launched, the text shruggie's usage continued to trend upward, sometimes exceeding the emoji version. People were that attached to the original.
🤷 lives in the space between caring and not caring. It's the perfect reply when someone asks where to eat ("🤷 you pick"), when plans fall through ("🤷 oh well"), or when you genuinely don't know the answer. On X and TikTok, it's become shorthand for performative indifference, a way to share an opinion while maintaining plausible deniability. Jane Solomon, lexicographer and Unicode Emoji Subcommittee member, described this usage as "a layer of protection" against the internet's demand for constant self-promotion. In group chats, 🤷 is often the conversation closer: someone proposes something no one's excited about, and the shrugs roll in. It ranks #20 in global emoji usage, making it less common than the top reaction emojis but firmly established as a go-to gesture emoji. In Slack, it's popular but carries risk. A 🤷 reaction to your manager's message reads very differently than a 🤷 in a group chat with friends.
It means "I don't know," "I don't care," "whatever," or "it is what it is." The shrug emoji expresses uncertainty, indifference, resignation, or casual dismissal. It's the visual equivalent of raising your shoulders and turning your palms up.
Mostly, yes. 🤷 is the visual equivalent of typing "IDK" (I don't know). But 🤷 carries more emotional range: it can also mean "I don't care" or "whatever happens, happens," which IDK doesn't. The shrug adds a gestural quality that text abbreviations lack, conveying tone through body language.
The shrug dominates reaction emoji searches
What it means from...
A 🤷 from your crush is tricky. If they shrug in response to "what are you up to?", it probably means nothing. But if you keep getting 🤷 replies to things you're excited about, that's not great. Sweetyhigh puts it bluntly: "if you keep getting this emoji from your crush in response to pretty benign messages, they may be essentially telling you that they don't care and you're bothering them." Harsh, but worth hearing.
Between partners, 🤷 usually means "I'm fine with whatever you decide." It's the classic response to "what do you want for dinner?" But context matters: if your partner shrugs at something you're genuinely asking their opinion on, it can feel dismissive. The difference between endearing indecision and frustrating apathy is the topic and the tone around it.
Among friends, 🤷 is easygoing. "Should we go out tonight?" "🤷 I'm down for whatever." It works as a low-pressure response that keeps options open without committing. In group chats, a chorus of 🤷 replies means the group has officially hit decision paralysis.
Be careful here. 🤷 on Slack in response to a question about a deadline or project status reads as "I don't know and I'm not going to find out." A Quora thread on why people find the shrug emoji condescending explains it well: "a brief nonverbal token can imply your problem isn't worth my effort." Use 🤷 at work only in casual channels and only when genuine uncertainty is acceptable.
Usually genuine indecision or casual indifference. If a guy responds to your plans with 🤷, he's probably fine with whatever you decide. If he's shrugging at things you're excited about, that's less great. Repeated shrugs to benign messages can signal he's not that interested in the conversation.
Same basic meaning but sometimes with more emotional range. 🤷♀️ from a girl could be genuine uncertainty, playful indifference ("🤷♀️ who knows"), or subtle frustration. If she uses it in response to your suggestion, she might be deferring the decision to you. If it comes with no other context after a longer message from you, she might be signaling disinterest.
Emoji combos
Mapping 🤷 against its emotional neighbors
Origin story
The story of 🤷 starts long before 2016. The text-based predecessor, ¯\\\_(ツ)\\_/¯, known as the "shruggie", is a kaomoji, a Japanese style of emoticon that uses a wider range of characters than Western emoticons. The katakana character ツ ("tsu") forms the face, flanked by underscores and backslashes for arms. Nobody knows who assembled these nine characters first, but kaomoji originated in 1980s Japanese ASCII art communities.
The shruggie broke into mainstream internet culture in September 2009, when hip-hop group Travis Porter tweeted it in response to Kanye West's infamous interruption of Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards. It spread fast. Then in 2010-2011, StarCraft II pro player SeleCT became famous for shrugging nonchalantly after competitive wins. His fans spammed streams with "sup son? ¯\\\_(ツ)\\_/¯" during his matches, fusing the gesture with esports culture.
By 2016, the shruggie was so entrenched in online communication that Slack founder Stewart Butterfield had it permanently in his Twitter bio. He described it as "really nice shorthand" for a feeling that words couldn't efficiently capture. When Unicode finally approved the official 🤷 emoji in June 2016 as part of 72 new emoji in Unicode 9.0, it was arriving to an audience that had been shrugging online for years. Notably, the text version didn't die. Pulsar research showed that even after the emoji launched, shruggie usage continued climbing, at times exceeding the emoji version.
The emoji's meaning has shifted over time too. University of Toronto semiotics professor Marcel Danesi described the original shruggie as having a "slanted smile" that adds "a distinctive nonchalance." But by 2020, transmedia artist Carla Gannis observed that the shrug had taken on "a malaise," an expression of "What is true anymore? I don't know" in response to climate anxiety, misinformation, and institutional distrust.
Approved in Unicode 9.0 (June 2016) under the official name "Shrug" with codepoint . Added to Emoji 3.0 in 2016. Released alongside 🤦 (Person Facepalming) and 🤞 (Crossed Fingers) in the same 72-emoji batch. Initially displayed with a gendered appearance, it got a gender-neutral redesign on most platforms in 2019 as part of Apple's iOS 13.2 gender-neutral emoji push. Gendered variants 🤷♂️ and 🤷♀️ use ZWJ sequences, and all versions support five Fitzpatrick skin tone modifiers.
How people shrug online: emoji vs text
The shrug might be hardwired into humans
Charles Darwin spotted it first. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), he used the shrug as his central illustration of "antithesis": opposite mental states produce opposite physical movements. He also noted it in children born blind, which ruled out imitation as the source. If a blind toddler raises their shoulders and flips their palms when they don't know something, it's not a learned behavior. It's baked in.
The anatomy backs this up. A full shrug engages the trapezius and levator scapulae in the neck, and the forearm's supinator muscle rotates the palms upward. The fingers extend automatically. It's one of the few gestures where the body does a coordinated sequence without conscious rigging.
So why doesn't 🤷 work everywhere online?
Design history
- 2009Shruggie ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ goes viral after Kanye/Swift VMAs incident via Travis Porter tweet↗
- 2010StarCraft II player SeleCT popularizes the gesture in esports; "sup son? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" becomes a meme↗
- 2016Unicode 9.0 / Emoji 3.0 approves 🤷 as U+1F937 "Shrug" (June); Apple adds it in iOS 10.2 (October)↗
- 2019Apple introduces gender-neutral Person Shrugging in iOS 13.2 (October); Google follows with gender-inclusive default↗
Around the world
The shrug gesture isn't universal. In Western countries like the US, Sweden, and Morocco, shrugging means hesitation or uncertainty. But in Japan and China, shrugging is uncommon and isn't a typical way to express confusion. People from the Philippines, Iran, and Iraq may interpret a shrug as somewhat impolite, reading it as dismissive confidence rather than honest uncertainty. This creates real communication gaps: a casual 🤷 in a conversation with someone from a culture where shrugging carries negative connotations could land badly.
In some cultures, yes. While shrugging is casual and accepted in Western countries, in Japan and China it's uncommon and not a standard gesture for uncertainty. In the Philippines, Iran, and Iraq, a shrug may be interpreted as impolite or dismissively confident. If you're communicating cross-culturally, be aware that 🤷 might not land the way you intend.
Anthropologists call it a "candidate gestural universal," and Darwin documented it in blind children in 1872. It's been recorded in speakers of Yoruba, Hausa, Luo, Awtuw, Enga, and Yele, and in deaf signers across Greenland, Turkey, Mexico, and Israel. That breadth, with no common cultural ancestor, suggests the physical shrug is closer to instinct than etiquette. The 🤷 emoji, however, isn't universal: countries where shrugging isn't a common gesture (Japan, China, parts of the Middle East) read the emoji differently or barely use it.
Yes, actually. In State v. D.R.C. (Washington, 2020), a teen's texts about her mother read as genuine threats in plain text, but an appeals court ruled that the shrug and laughing emojis wrapped around them flipped the meaning to sarcasm. Law professor Eric Goldman wrote that without the emojis, conviction was "possible or even probable." Courts now treat 🤷 as analogous to a physical gesture, which means it can modify the tone of written evidence either way, softening a threat or seasoning a confession.
AI loves a good shrug, too
There's a twist. U.S. users in a mental-health chatbot study rated AI messages lower when they contained emojis than when they didn't. People want chatbots to sound informed. The shrug that works between friends can feel evasive when it comes from a model you're trusting with a hard question.
Gender variants
The shrug emoji has a text-based ancestor that's famously genderless: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. When Unicode turned it into a visual emoji, the gender question became unavoidable. Most platforms initially rendered 🤷 as female, which set the cultural default. Now 🤷♀️ is the go-to version and one of the most popular gendered variants in the entire emoji set.
🤷♀️ and 🤷♂️ carry subtly different tones. The woman shrug leans "it is what it is" or "not my problem" with a hint of sassiness. The man shrug reads more as genuine confusion or helplessness. This difference exists entirely in usage patterns, not the emoji design itself. Both show the same palms-up, shoulders-raised gesture. The kaomoji ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ had none of this gendered baggage, which is part of why it's still widely used even after the emoji exists.
When shrugs showed up in evidence
Popularity ranking
Search interest
Often confused with
Released in the same Unicode 9.0 batch and often used together, but they express opposite things. 🤦 is active frustration ("I can't believe this"). 🤷 is passive uncertainty ("I don't know / I don't care"). You facepalm at someone's mistake. You shrug at the unknowable.
Released in the same Unicode 9.0 batch and often used together, but they express opposite things. 🤦 is active frustration ("I can't believe this"). 🤷 is passive uncertainty ("I don't know / I don't care"). You facepalm at someone's mistake. You shrug at the unknowable.
💁 (Person Tipping Hand) looks similar with its arm gesture, but the vibe is completely different. 💁 is sassy information delivery ("well actually..."). 🤷 is genuine or performed ignorance ("beats me"). The tipping hand has attitude; the shrug has apathy.
💁 (Person Tipping Hand) looks similar with its arm gesture, but the vibe is completely different. 💁 is sassy information delivery ("well actually..."). 🤷 is genuine or performed ignorance ("beats me"). The tipping hand has attitude; the shrug has apathy.
😐 (Neutral Face) shares the "I don't care" energy, but it's more deadpan and less expressive. 🤷 actively performs indifference with a visible gesture, while 😐 is just... blank. The shrug says "whatever" out loud; the neutral face says nothing at all.
😐 (Neutral Face) shares the "I don't care" energy, but it's more deadpan and less expressive. 🤷 actively performs indifference with a visible gesture, while 😐 is just... blank. The shrug says "whatever" out loud; the neutral face says nothing at all.
They were released in the same Unicode 9.0 batch in 2016 and are often used together, but they express opposite emotions. 🤷 is passive ("I don't know, whatever"). 🤦 is active ("I can't believe this happened"). You shrug at uncertainty. You facepalm at stupidity. Together, 🤦🤷 means "that was dumb, but what can you do."
The shruggie (¯\_(ツ)_/¯) is the text-based precursor to the 🤷 emoji. It's a kaomoji, a Japanese style of emoticon using characters from multiple scripts. It predates the emoji by years, went viral in 2009 after the Kanye/Taylor VMAs incident, and has a retro charm the emoji can't replicate. Pulsar research showed the text version's usage kept growing even after the emoji launched in 2016.
Do's and don'ts
- ✗Don't reply to a coworker's serious question with just 🤷, it reads as dismissive
- ✗Avoid shrugging at someone sharing something they're excited about
- ✗Don't use it repeatedly in a conversation as it signals you're checked out
- ✗Skip it in formal communication where uncertainty needs to be spelled out
It can be. A Quora thread on why people find the shrug condescending explains it well: a brief nonverbal token can imply "your problem isn't worth my effort." Context is everything. A 🤷 in response to "where should we eat?" is harmless. A 🤷 in response to someone sharing exciting news feels dismissive. Adding words before or after the emoji removes the ambiguity.
Yes, but choose your moments. A 🤷 in a casual Slack channel about lunch plans is fine. A 🤷 in response to your manager asking about a project deadline is not. The emoji lacks mitigating language, so it can read as "I don't know and I'm not going to find out." When genuinely uncertain about something work-related, spell it out instead.
Caption ideas
Aesthetic sets
Fun facts
- •The shruggie ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ uses the katakana character ツ ("tsu") as its face. It's a form of kaomoji, the Japanese tradition of expressing emotion through text characters. The Western :) tradition reads horizontally; kaomoji reads vertically.
- •Slack founder Stewart Butterfield kept the shruggie in his Twitter bio and described it as "really nice shorthand" that "creates identity or self-expression in a really limited palette."
- •Even after Unicode launched the official 🤷 emoji in 2016, Pulsar's analysis showed the text shruggie's usage continued climbing. At certain points, the ASCII version was more popular than the emoji. People were more attached to the original than anyone expected.
- •The shrug gesture means different things in different cultures. In the Philippines, Iran, and Iraq, it can be read as impolite or dismissively confident rather than honestly uncertain.
- •A craft beer was named after the shruggie, and a venture capital firm incorporated it into their branding. The nine-character emoticon became a cultural icon with commercial staying power.
- •The ツ character in ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is the Japanese katakana for "tsu." In Japan, it's just a phonetic character with no emotional meaning. Its use as a smiley face is a purely Western invention. The StarCraft II community was one of the first to spread the shruggie to a wider Western audience through gaming forums.
- •Anthropologists call the shrug a "candidate gestural universal". It's been documented in speakers of Yoruba, Hausa, Luo, Awtuw, Enga, and Yele, and in deaf signers across Greenland, Turkey, Mexico, and Israel. Populations with no shared cultural path keep inventing the same gesture, which is the kind of pattern that points to biology rather than convention.
- •Darwin used the shrug as his central example of "antithesis" in his 1872 book on emotions. He documented the gesture in children born blind, ruling out imitation as the source. The body learns to shrug without anyone teaching it.
- •A 2023 count by Santa Clara law professor Eric Goldman logged 225 U.S. court cases referencing emojis, a 17% increase over 2022. In State v. D.R.C., a Washington appeals court ruled that a shrug wrapped around violent-sounding text flipped the meaning into sarcasm. Emoji-as-tone is now officially admissible.
- •Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre physically shrugged at her final White House briefing in January 2025 when asked about the Israel-Hamas ceasefire. Cable chyrons literally used the 🤷 emoji in their chryons covering the moment.
- •A 2025 study of LLM chatbot emoji use found that models like GPT-4 and Claude reach for 🤷 specifically to soften refusals and admit ignorance politely. Emojis in AI replies are mostly social glue, not information; the shrug is the glue that holds "I don't know" together.
- •Reddit is famous for eating the shruggie's left arm. The backslash is a Markdown escape character, so renders as ¯_(ツ)_/¯ (armless) unless you triple-escape it: . Entire Reddit threads exist just to debug this formatting problem.
In pop culture
- •The text kaomoji was so popular on Reddit that the platform's formatting would infamously eat the left arm if users forgot to escape the backslash. The armless became a meme in itself. When Unicode added 🤷 in 2016, multiple tech publications ran headlines like "the shrug emoji is finally here" because the text version was so widely used and so hard to type correctly.
- •Emoji court cases mentioning 🤷 and other gesture emojis spiked from 33 in 2017 to 53 in 2018 according to Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman. Courts are increasingly treating emojis like 🤷 as analogous to physical gestures: a shrug for "no offense" or a nod for "yes."
- •The Elmo shrug meme (a screenshot of Elmo from Sesame Street throwing up his arms with a blank expression) became one of the most-used reaction images on the internet. When 🤷 arrived in 2016, people immediately drew the comparison: Elmo was the unofficial mascot of the shrug emoji.
- •Apple's original 🤷 design sparked discussion because the female-presenting version (🤷♀️) became far more popular than the male version (🤷♂️) or the gender-neutral default. Usage data consistently shows 🤷♀️ outpacing the other variants by a wide margin, making it one of the clearest cases of gendered emoji preference.
- •On January 15, 2025, outgoing Biden Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre physically shrugged during her final White House briefing when pressed on the Israel-Hamas ceasefire. The clip circulated on political X with the shrug emoji inserted into chyrons and reply threads, a tidy example of the physical gesture and the emoji becoming interchangeable in political coverage.
Trivia
For developers
- •Base codepoint is . Gender variants use ZWJ sequences: (woman) and (man).
- •Slack shortcodes: , , or . The text shruggie renders as literal text (no emoji substitution).
- •The backslash in ¯\\\_(ツ)\\_/¯ is notoriously tricky to escape. In JavaScript strings you need . In Markdown, the backslash is an escape character, so you'll need to double it. Reddit famously eats the left arm if you don't escape it properly: ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
- •On older platforms that don't support ZWJ, the gendered variants may render as separate characters: 🤷♀ instead of 🤷♀️.
The text version uses nine characters: ¯ (macron), \ (backslash), _ (underscore), ( (parenthesis), ツ (katakana tsu), ), _, /, ¯. On most phones, search for "tsu" in your Japanese keyboard or copy-paste it. On Slack, type . On Windows, Win+Period and search "shrug." Fair warning: the backslash often gets eaten by Markdown and Reddit formatting, losing the left arm.
Each platform (Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft) designs its own version. In 2019, Apple introduced gender-neutral person emojis in iOS 13.2, making the default shrug more androgynous. Google implemented their own gender-inclusive version around the same time. The core gesture is the same across platforms, but details like hair, clothing, and facial expression vary.
It was approved as part of Unicode 9.0 in June 2016 and added to Emoji 3.0 the same year. Apple added it in iOS 10.2 (released October 2016). But the text shruggie ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ had been in wide use since 2009, making the emoji a latecomer to a gesture that was already deeply embedded in internet culture.
Because it's doing exactly what humans do. A 2025 social-semiotic study of LLM chatbots found that emojis in AI responses are primarily about relationship management, not content. Models reach for 🤷 to soften "I don't know," acknowledge a limitation, or refuse a request without sounding cold. ChatGPT's own read of the shrug's meaning, "lack of knowledge," matches human annotators almost exactly, so when it uses the emoji, it's signaling the same thing you would.
See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.
When do you use 🤷?
Select all that apply
- Person Shrugging Emoji (emojipedia.org)
- Shruggie: how the non-emoji emoji continues to thrive (pulsarplatform.com)
- The evolving meaning of the shrug emoji (nowtoronto.com)
- Person Shrugging Emoji Meaning (dictionary.com)
- What the Shrug Emoji Means in Texting (sweetyhigh.com)
- iOS 10.2 Emoji First Look: Shrug, Fingers Crossed, Face Palm (blog.emojipedia.org)
- Unicode 9.0 Released With 72 New Emojis (blog.emojipedia.org)
- Sup Son ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (knowyourmeme.com)
- Stewart Butterfield of Slack Is Trying His Hardest (fortune.com)
- How Emojis are Perceived Differently by Different Cultures (daytranslations.com)
- Why do I find the shrug emoji condescending? (quora.com)
- Emoji frequency ranking (doofinder.com)
- Unicode brings forward gender neutral timeline (blog.emojipedia.org)
- Shruggie - Wiktionary (wiktionary.org)
- New emoji arriving in June 2016 (techcrunch.com)
- Origins of the shrug (kensycooperrider.com)
- Darwin in the world of emotions (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
- The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Chapter 14 (brocku.ca)
- The Palm-Up Puzzle (frontiersin.org)
- A cross-linguistic approach to shrugging in 5 languages (hal.science)
- Emojis Keep Teen Out of Jail: State v. D.R.C. (blog.ericgoldman.org)
- Emojis and Emoticons in U.S. Court Opinions (2023) (digitalcommons.law.scu.edu)
- Emoji as interpersonal resources in LLM chatbot conversations (tandfonline.com)
- Emojis Decoded: Leveraging ChatGPT for Enhanced Understanding (arxiv.org)
- Final Biden WH briefing features KJP non-answers and a shrug (newsbusters.org)
- Palm-up signs and shoulder-shrug anatomy (center-for-nonverbal-studies.org)
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