Confused Emoji

😕 Confused Face is the plain one: a flat, slightly skewed mouth and a look that says "I don't follow" without any drama. It has been around since Unicode 6.1 in 2012, and it is still the answer to "which emoji means confused". 🫤 Face with Diagonal Mouth, added in 2021, is its cousin for "meh, not sure about that": the mouth slants harder and the eyes are open, so it reads as unconvinced rather than lost. On a keyboard both match the old :/ emoticon.

🤔 Thinking Face puts a hand to the chin: "hmm, let me think", "is that right?" or, very often, a polite way of saying "that sounds made up". It arrived in Unicode 8.0 in 2015 and quickly became one of the most used reaction emoji anywhere. 🤨 Face with Raised Eyebrow (2017) is more pointed: one eyebrow up, mouth flat, "I'm not buying it". People often call it the Colbert emoji because the proposal cited Stephen Colbert's trademark eyebrow. 🧐 Face with Monocle is the same scepticism with a magnifying lens: inspecting something closely, slightly posh, often ironic.

The blank faces belong here too. 😐 Neutral Face and 😑 Expressionless Face are the written equivalent of staring at a message and saying nothing; 😶 Face Without Mouth is speechless, and 😬 Grimacing Face is the awkward "yikes, I have no idea what to say". 😳 Flushed Face covers being caught off guard ("wait, what?"), and 🙃 Upside-Down Face says "nothing makes sense any more, and I'm smiling through it". For bored and sarcastic shades of these faces, see the Bored & Meh Emoji and Sarcastic & Sassy Emoji collections.

Dizzy emoji: 😵‍💫, 😵, 🥴 and 🤯

😵‍💫 Face with Spiral Eyes is the dizzy emoji people mean when they say "my head is spinning": too much information, too many tabs open, a timetable that changed three times. It is technically a sequence of 😵 joined to 💫, released in Emoji 13.1 in 2020. Before that, 😵 was called Dizzy Face and platforms disagreed about its eyes: most drew spirals, some drew X marks. Emoji 13.1 settled the dispute by giving every vendor X eyes on 😵, now named Face with Crossed-Out Eyes, and spirals their own emoji. Today 😵 means knocked out, dead tired or "I'm done", while 😵‍💫 means dizzy and confused.

🥴 Woozy Face, from 2018, has a drunk, lopsided look: dazed, tipsy, or so smitten that thinking is hard. 🤯 Exploding Head is "mind blown": the information was so surprising your brain gave up, which can be either confusion or delight. 💫 Dizzy is the swirl of stars that manga draws around a character's head after a knock, and 🌀 Cyclone, a typhoon sign from Japanese weather maps, now stands for spiralling thoughts, hypnosis or being pulled into something you do not understand.

The newest faces are about being shaken rather than puzzled. 🫨 Shaking Face (Emoji 15.0, 2022) is "shook": rattled by news, by an earthquake, or by a message you had to read twice. 🫪 Distorted Face (Emoji 17.0, approved September 2025) is a bulging, stretched face, a standalone version of the Emoji Kitchen mashup of two flushed faces, used for panic, bug-eyed shock and "huh?!"; being brand new, it still shows as a box on many older phones. 🫠 Melting Face is overwhelmed and slowly dissolving, and 😶‍🌫️ Face in Clouds with 🌫️ Fog is brain fog: spaced out, cannot think straight. 🫥 Dotted Line Face is the one for feeling lost and invisible.

Shrug, question mark emoji and "I have no idea"

🤷 Person Shrugging (Unicode 9.0, 2016) is the universal "no idea", "who knows" or "idk"; most keyboards also offer the woman and man versions 🤷‍♀️ 🤷‍♂️. 🙋 Person Raising Hand is the polite way to ask a question in a group chat, and 👀 Eyes alone means "wait, I'm watching this, explain". 💭 Thought Balloon marks something you are still working out, 🧠 Brain is the organ that has stopped working, and 💡 Light Bulb is the moment it finally clicks. 🧩 Puzzle Piece, 🔍 🔎 the magnifying glasses and 🕵️ Detective are for digging into a mystery.

❓ Red Question Mark and ❔ White Question Mark are the question mark emoji; the red one is the strong "what??", the white one is softer and is often paired with ❕ for a quiet aside. ⁉️ Exclamation Question Mark is shock and confusion in one glyph: "wait, WHAT?!". All three date from Unicode 6.0 in 2010, though ⁉ as a text character is older. If you ever see a question mark inside a box instead of an emoji, that is your device telling you it does not have the font for a new character yet, for example 🫪 on a phone that has not been updated.

Question mark symbols and the confused text face

The plain ? descends from the punctus interrogativus of medieval manuscripts. Spanish opens a question with ¿ Inverted Question Mark, a rule the Real Academia Española introduced in 1754, and Arabic, Persian and Urdu use the mirrored ؟. Greek writes its question mark as ; Greek Question Mark, which looks exactly like a semicolon: Unicode even treats it as equivalent to one, so paste it with care. ⸮ Reversed Question Mark revives the percontation point that the printer Henry Denham proposed in the 1580s to mark a rhetorical question. Chinese and Japanese text use the wide ？ Fullwidth Question Mark, with ︖ for vertical text and the compact ﹖ for small type.

The doubled marks are for emphasis: ⁇ Double Question Mark (???), ⁈ Question Exclamation Mark (?!) and ‽ Interrobang, the ? and ! fused into one character that the advertising executive Martin K. Speckter invented in 1962 for questions asked in disbelief; ⸘ is its Spanish-style inverted twin, and 🙹 🙺 🙻 are its ornamental versions. ⍰ is a question mark in a box from the APL programming language, and 🯄 is a white-on-black one from old computer character sets.

For a text-only confused face, the shrug kaomoji ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is built from ¯ Macron, an underscore, brackets, the Japanese katakana ツ Tsu and two slashes. ಠ_ಠ, the look of disapproval, uses the Kannada letter ಠ as a pair of narrowed eyes. Other classics are (⊙_☉), (・_・ヾ and (°ロ°) ?; the plain emoticon :/ still works everywhere. 🗬 and 🗭 are text-style thought bubbles for decorating a line of "hmm".