Surprised & Shocked Emoji

The three open-mouth faces are a scale. 😮 Face with Open Mouth is the small "oh!": you just heard something you did not expect, good or bad. 😯 Hushed Face has the same mouth but raised eyebrows and a quieter look, a startled "oh really?" that is often read as mild shock or even as being told to keep quiet. 😲 Astonished Face is the big one, with the mouth and eyes wide open; on most platforms the eyes are drawn bulging, and some keyboards still label it "shocked face". 😮 and 😯 arrived in Unicode 6.1 in 2012, 😲 two years earlier with the first big emoji release, Unicode 6.0.

When the surprise turns to horror you reach for 😱 Face Screaming in Fear: hands on the cheeks, mouth open, face drained pale or blue, a pose that echoes Edvard Munch's painting The Scream. In practice it is sent far more often for drama than for actual fear, so "OMG the tickets sold out 😱" is normal. 🙀 Weary Cat is its cat version, drawn screaming on every major platform despite its name, and 😨 Fearful Face is shock with a cold sweat. 😦 Frowning Face with Open Mouth and 😧 Anguished Face are the "oh no" gasps, when the news is bad rather than exciting, and 😬 Grimacing Face is the clenched "yikes". For the frightened end of this scale see Scared & Nervous Emoji.

Shocked emoji: 🤯 mind blown, 🫨 shaking face, 😵‍💫 dazed

🤯 Exploding Head is the emoji for "mind blown": a fact, a plot twist or a price so unexpected that the top of the head lifts off in a mushroom cloud. Its full Unicode name is Shocked Face with Exploding Head, and it was added in 2017 with Emoji 5.0. People pair it with 💥 Collision for the bang, 💫 Dizzy for seeing stars, ⚡ High Voltage for a literal shock and 💣 Bomb when the news was a bombshell.

🫨 Shaking Face is the newest shocked face, approved in Emoji 15.0 in 2022 and on phones since 2023. It is a face vibrating with wide eyes: "I'm shook", "I'm shaking", or the moment after a jump scare. Because it is just a trembling face, it also gets used for an earthquake, loud bass, being cold or being too excited to sit still, so read it with the message around it. 😵 Face with Crossed-Out Eyes and 😵‍💫 Face with Spiral Eyes are the knocked-flat aftermath: stunned, dazed, overwhelmed. Until 2021 there was only one dizzy face, 😵, and Apple drew it with spiral eyes; when the spiral-eyed 😵‍💫 arrived in Emoji 13.1, Apple redrew 😵 with X eyes and Unicode renamed it from "dizzy face" to the crossed-out-eyes name it has now. 🌀 Cyclone stands in for the spiral when you want the swirl on its own.

The quiet shocks matter too. 😶 Face Without Mouth is speechless, and 👀 Eyes looking sideways is the reaction that says "did you all see that?" without a word; it is one of the most used reaction emoji on Discord and Slack for exactly that reason. The stare meme 👁️👄👁️, built from 👁️ Eye and 👄 Mouth, is the same idea pushed to absurdity: frozen, watching, unable to look away. 😳 Flushed Face is surprise with red cheeks, caught off guard or embarrassed, and 🫢 Face with Open Eyes and Hand Over Mouth (Emoji 14.0, 2021) is the gasp behind a hand, the gossip reaction, with its older sibling 🤭 for the giggling version and 🫣 and 🙈 for "I can't look". For a happy wow, 🤩 Star-Struck and ✨ Sparkles say amazed rather than alarmed; more of those live under Excited Emoji and Happy & Laughing Emoji.

OMG punctuation: ‼️ ⁉️ and the interrobang

Surprise has its own punctuation. ‼️ Double Exclamation Mark is "no way!!", and ⁉️ Exclamation Question Mark is "wait, what?!", the disbelief that 🤨 Face with Raised Eyebrow shows on a face. Both came into emoji from the Japanese mobile carrier sets, which is why they exist as emoji while plain !! does not. ❗ and ❕ are the single red and grey exclamation marks, ❓ and ❔ their question-mark twins; the red ones read as louder, the grey ones as an aside.

The text versions give you more shapes to play with. ‽ Interrobang fuses ? and ! into one character; it was proposed in 1962 by the American advertising executive Martin K. Speckter for exactly the sentence that is both a question and an exclamation ("You did what‽"). ⸘ is its upside-down Spanish partner, ⁈ and ⁇ are the question-exclamation and double-question marks as single characters, ¡ and ¿ open a Spanish ¡¿Qué?!, ❢ is a heavy ornamental exclamation mark, ！ and ？ are the wide full-width marks used in Japanese and Chinese text, and 🙹 🙺 🙻 are decorative interrobangs. For every other mark see Punctuation Symbols.

Shocked text faces: (⊙_⊙), Σ(°△°|||) and O_O

Before emoji, surprise was typed as O_O, :O and :-O, a capital O for a round open mouth or two for wide eyes. Japanese kaomoji made the eyes the main event: (⊙_⊙) and (◎_◎;) stare with ringed pupils, (°o°) and ヽ(°〇°)ﾉ gasp with a tiny degree sign for each eye and a round mouth, (@_@) is dazed, and ( ꒪Д꒪) borrows the Cyrillic letter Д as a mouth hanging open with the lower lip drooping. Σ(°△°|||) is the classic flinch of surprise: the Greek capital Σ is the body jerking back, the triangle is an open mouth, and the three bars are the manga shading that falls over a shocked character's face.

The grid holds the parts so you can build your own. For eyes: ⊙ ◎ ◉ ○ ● 〇 ◯ and the IPA letter ʘ, plus the Cyrillic Ꙫ, which already has two eyes, and ꙮ, the ten-eyed multiocular O. For the mouth: 口 □ ロ △ ▽ ᯅ, the round ゜ ° º, the open Д and ꒪. Add Σ in front for the flinch, ︵ for a dropped jaw, and @ for spinning eyes. They survive where emoji do not: usernames, game chat, plain-text comments. Hundreds of ready-made faces of every mood are in Kaomoji Symbols; on Discord and Slack the shortcodes are :open_mouth: 😮, :hushed: 😯, :astonished: 😲, :scream: 😱, :exploding_head: 🤯, :flushed: 😳, :eyes: 👀, :bangbang: ‼️ and :interrobang: ⁉️.