囧jiǒng

The old meaning of the character is “bright”, from a picture of light coming through a window. Almost nobody used it. The internet meaning comes from the shape alone: the two strokes inside the box look like sad eyebrows, and the small box under them looks like an open mouth.

As a word, it describes a moment you would like to forget. 太囧了 means “so awkward”, and a 囧事 is an embarrassing thing that happened to you.

Young people use it less than they did in 2008, and to some it sounds like a word from their older cousins’ forums. You still see it in headlines and in 囧事, and almost everyone online knows it.

Chinese Wikipedia traces the face to Taiwanese forums around 2004 and 2005, where people used it next to the Japanese emoticon orz, a little figure on its knees. The two were joined into 囧rz. Other accounts put the start later, in a 2008 forum thread. The first use is not certain.

In 2008 the character spread across the mainland internet, and Chinese news reports that year listed it among the most popular internet words. It later gave its name to two hit comedy films, Lost on Journey (2010) and Lost in Thailand (2012), whose Chinese titles both use 囧.