Tête à Toto

Tête à Toto is a French typographical design and children's game well known to French schoolchildren. The design turns the simple arithmetic statement zero plus zero equals zero into a face: the first two zeros become a pair of eyes, the plus sign becomes a nose, the equals sign becomes a mouth, and the final zero frames the whole face as an outline. Children draw the figure step by step while reciting a short French rhyme, zero plus zero equals Toto's head, timing each stroke of the drawing to a word of the rhyme. Toto is a stock character in French children's culture, a generic figure used across a wide body of jokes, and the punchline of this rhyme plays on the idea that if Toto's head equals zero, then Toto has no intelligence at all. The design and rhyme function together as a small performance passed between schoolchildren rather than a competitive game with winners and losers. Equivalent doodle-and-rhyme traditions exist in other languages, including the Japanese Henohenomoheji face built from hiragana characters.