Bored & Meh Emoji

😐 Neutral Face is the plain straight face: open eyes, a flat line for a mouth, no opinion. People call it the poker face emoji, the meh emoji or the straight face emoji, and in a chat it says "okay", "no comment" or "I have nothing to add" without committing to anything. 😑 Expressionless Face is the same mouth with the eyes closed to flat lines. That small change moves it from blank to fed up: "I heard you", "not this again", "I'm done". If you want to show you are bored rather than merely unmoved, 😑 is the sharper of the two.

😶 Face Without Mouth is speechless or deliberately silent, a good reply when you have nothing to say and want that to be noticed. 🫥 Dotted Line Face (2021) fades into the background, used for feeling invisible, checked out or wishing you were somewhere else; 😶‍🌫️ Face in Clouds is the brain-fog version, zoned out and not following. 🫤 Face With Diagonal Mouth is the emoji form of the typed :/, the "meh, not convinced" look, and 😕 Confused Face is its milder, puzzled cousin. 🙃 Upside-Down Face is the smile that does not mean it, "great, another meeting" said with a straight face.

Unamused, eye roll and whatever: the meh emoji with attitude

😒 Unamused Face looks off to the side with half-closed eyes, which is why many people know it as the side eye emoji. It means "not impressed", "really?" or a dry "whatever", and it has been on phones since the first emoji set in Unicode 6.0 (2010). 🙄 Face With Rolling Eyes arrived in 2015 and quickly became one of the most used reaction faces: boredom with someone's behaviour rather than with a situation, "here we go again". 🤨 Face with Raised Eyebrow (2017) doubts rather than dismisses; 😏 Smirking Face is the smug half-smile, a lazy "sure you did". 😬 Grimacing Face is the clenched smile for an awkward pause, the face you make while waiting for a moment to pass.

Two non-faces carry a lot of meh. 🤷 Person Shrugging is "dunno, don't care" in one gesture, the same meaning as the typed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. 🗿 Moai, the stone head from Easter Island (its Unicode name is Moyai, after a statue outside Shibuya station in Tokyo), is the deadpan "bruh" reaction on TikTok and Discord: a face so unmoved it is literally made of rock.

Bored to sleep: yawning, sighing and dozing off

🥱 Yawning Face is the one emoji made for being bored. It was added in 2019 (Emoji 12.0), long after the other faces, and is the direct reply to a dull story, a long speech or a game that is going nowhere. 😮‍💨 Face Exhaling is the sigh: relief in some contexts, but after a boring request it reads as "fine, if I must". 😔 Pensive Face is the quieter sigh with eyes down, closer to flat and listless than to sad.

Then the body gives up. 😪 Sleepy Face is nodding off (the drop is a manga sleep bubble from the nose, not a tear), 🫩 Face with Bags Under Eyes (2024) is drained and over it, 😴 Sleeping Face and 💤 Zzz mean the conversation has put you to sleep. 😴 is also the classic one-emoji review of a boring film or match. For genuine tiredness and bedtime, see the Sleep & Tired Emoji collection; here these faces stand for boredom so complete that sleep wins.

Waiting, killing time and dead chats

Boredom is mostly waiting, and emoji have the props for it. ⏳ Hourglass Not Done is time still running, the standard "still waiting" reply; ⌛ Hourglass Done is the sand finally through. 🕰️ Mantelpiece Clock is the old clock ticking on a slow afternoon, and ⏸️ Pause Button says life is on hold. 🧍 Person Standing is standing around with nothing to do, the awkward idle figure of countless memes; 🛋️ Couch and Lamp and 🪟 Window are the bored-at-home pair, lying on the sofa and staring outside.

For slowness people reach for animals: 🐌 Snail and 🐢 Turtle for a slow reply or a day that crawls, 🦥 Sloth for not planning to move at all. 🦗 Cricket is the sound of crickets, the reply to a message that got no reaction or a group chat that has gone dead: 🦗🦗🦗 means "well, that landed with nobody".

Bored text faces: -_- , ಠ_ಠ and the symbols that make them

The oldest bored face needs no emoji at all: -_-, a hyphen or two for closed eyes and an underscore for the mouth. Its longer forms (－_－) and (￣ー￣) use fullwidth and Japanese characters so the face sits evenly, and (=_=) uses an equals sign for heavier eyelids. The characters in the grid are the parts: _ ＿ for the mouth, － ー ‾ ￣ for closed eyes, and = for a tired double line.

ಠ_ಠ, the look of disapproval, is built from the Kannada letter ಠ (ṭha), whose shape happens to look like a glaring eye with an eyebrow; it spread through forums in the late 2000s and still reads as "unamused" everywhere. (¬_¬) and (￢_￢) are the side-eye faces made from the logical not sign, ⌐ flips it the other way, (≖_≖) is a narrower stare, and 눈_눈 uses the Korean syllable 눈, which means "eye". A sentence that just trails off with … or ⋯ is the typed equivalent of a shrug. Many more complete faces are in the Kaomoji Symbols collection.