I Dunno LOL ¯\(°_o)/¯ (2006)

About

The “I dunno LOL” textual emoticon ( ¯\(°_o)/¯ ) portrays a character shrugging, raising their arms in confusion. It is a often used as a response to “How do I shot web?” or any other question, really. This is used to indicate greater confusion than the standard O_o emoticon.

Uncertain Origin

Searches for “¯\(°_o)/¯” can be problematic because of how certain characters are omitted by many search engines, even when placed in quotes. The emoticon appears in many forum signatures which often results in false positives for 2002, shortly after vBulletin and other PHP forums first appeared.

The phrase “I dunno” has been a common English-language slang for “I don’t know” for decades and LOL has a long history as well. But the exact pairing of the two as “I dunno LOL” seems to first appear in 2006, as is evident from both a Google Date Range search, and from Google Insights (seen below).

Google Insights

Dramatica bears it only the slightest mention.

Urban Dictionary

The first definition of ¯\(°_o)/¯ on Urbandictionary was created by spacepuree on November 9th, 2006. Surprisingly, the definition does not contain the phrase “I dunno LOL.”

Excerpt:

The shrug face.
It’s not a zombie.
aznhottie15666 signed on at 12:00:00 AM.

aznhottie15666: wut r u doin?
moarbbqsauce: ¯\(°_o)/¯

aznhottie15666 signed off at 12:01:00 AM.

The first Urbandictionary definition to contain both and the phrase “I dunno LOL” was created by Link332 in 2007.

¯\(°_o)/¯ is a smiley that means “i dunno lol”

…¯\(°_o)/¯
¯\(°_o)/¯, i dunno lol