Heart Symbols

Two families sit here: text hearts ♡ ♥ ❥ ❦, which take the colour and size of the words around them, and emoji hearts ❤️ 💔 💖 💞, which stay coloured whatever you do to the font. Pick a text heart to blend into a name, an emoji heart to stand out.

Copy and Paste Heart Symbols

Every heart character Unicode defines is below, and they split into two groups that behave very differently once pasted. The text hearts — ♡ ♥ ❥ ❣ ❦ ❧ — take on the colour and size of the text around them. The emoji hearts — ❤️ 💔 💕 💖 and the colours — arrive as small pictures that ignore your formatting entirely. Which one you want depends on whether the heart should blend in or stand out.

What Are Heart Symbols?

Heart symbols are Unicode characters shaped like a heart. The oldest ones are card suits: ♥ U+2665 and ♡ U+2661 were encoded so that bridge and poker notation could be typeset, which is why their formal names are Black Heart Suit and White Heart Suit rather than anything to do with love. "Black" and "white" mean solid and outline here, not colour — a distinction that confuses people constantly, because ♥ prints in whatever colour your text is.

The romantic ones came later. ❤ is U+2764, formally Heavy Black Heart, and it is the character behind the red heart emoji. ❥ Rotated Heavy Black Heart Bullet and ❣ Heavy Heart Exclamation were drawn as typographic ornaments — bullets and punctuation — long before anyone thought of them as expressions of affection.

How to Use Heart Symbols

Typing Heart Symbols on a Keyboard

♥ is one of the few symbols with a genuinely short Windows shortcut: hold Alt and press 3 on the numeric keypad. That works because the original PC character set put the four card suits in its first sixteen positions, and Windows still honours those low codes.

♡ has no such shortcut, which is the honest answer to a question a lot of people arrive here asking. The outline heart was never in that legacy set, so on Windows you need the full decimal value — Alt and 9825 on the keypad — and that only works reliably in applications like Word. In Word you can also type 2661 and press Alt+X, which turns the digits into the character. On a Mac, open the Character Viewer with Ctrl+Cmd+Space and search for "heart". On Linux, Ctrl+Shift+U then 2661 and Enter. On a phone there is no route at all, so taking the character from the grid above is the only practical option.

Copying Heart Symbols on Phone and Desktop

Click any character and it goes to your clipboard on its own, with no formatting attached. Ctrl+V puts it back on Windows and Linux, Cmd+V on a Mac, long-press and Paste on a phone.

Heart Symbols That Change Colour When You Paste Them

This trips people up more than anything else on the page. ❤ and ❤️ look like the same thing in a list, but they are not the same text: the second carries an extra invisible character, U+FE0F, that asks the system for the emoji picture. Paste ❤ into a document and it stays in your text colour; paste ❤️ and it comes out red at a fixed size no matter what you do to the font.

If you want a heart that matches your words — black in black text, white in white text, growing when you increase the point size — use ♡, ♥, ❥ or ❦. Those have no emoji form and no platform will recolour them. This is what people mean when they search for text hearts rather than heart emojis.

Types of Heart Symbols

Text Heart Symbols

♡ ♥ are the outline and solid suits, ❥ is the rotated bullet with a stem, and ❣ is the heart exclamation — a heart sitting above a dot, meant to end a sentence. 🖤 is worth a mention here as the opposite case: it is called Black Heart and it genuinely is a black picture, unlike ♥, whose "black" only ever meant filled in.

Coloured Heart Symbols

❤️ 🧡 💛 💚 💙 💜 🖤 🤍 🤎 plus the newer 🩷 🩵 🩶 are one design in eleven colours — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, black, white, brown, pink, light blue and grey. They carry no built-in meaning; conventions around them vary by group and platform, and the only thing Unicode specifies is the colour name.

Named Heart Symbols

Several emoji hearts are distinct designs rather than recolours. 💔 is broken, 💓 beating, 💗 growing, 💖 sparkling, 💞 revolving, 💕 is two hearts, 💘 has an arrow through it, 💝 has a ribbon, and 💟 is the heart decoration — a heart in a rounded square. ❤️‍🔥 and ❤️‍🩹 are newer still: a heart on fire and a mending heart, each built by joining the red heart to a second character.

Floral and Ornamental Heart Symbols

❦ and ❧ are floral hearts, and they are the oldest things on this page by centuries. Printers called them fleurons or hedera and used them to break up blocks of text or mark a section end, long before Unicode existed. ☙ is the reversed rotated form. They read as decorative rather than affectionate, which makes them useful where an ordinary heart would be too much.

ღ is not a heart at all — it is the Georgian letter ghan. It sits here because Georgian speakers have used it as one for years, on the strength of its shape, and it is worth knowing what you are actually pasting.

Best Uses for Heart Symbols

Heart Symbols in Names and Bios

A display name or bio is where the text-versus-emoji choice matters most, because many platforms render the colour hearts at a size you cannot control and some strip them from usernames entirely. ♡ and ❥ survive in places ❤️ does not, and they sit on the line properly instead of pushing it apart.

Heart Symbols in Messages

In a message the colour hearts are the point — that is the register they belong to. ❣ is the quieter option for the end of a line, and ❦ works in a printed invitation or a signature where an emoji would look out of place.

Heart Symbols Unicode Names and Codes

The formal names describe drawing, not sentiment: ♡ is U+2661 White Heart Suit, ♥ is U+2665 Black Heart Suit, ❤ is U+2764 Heavy Black Heart, ❥ is U+2765 Rotated Heavy Black Heart Bullet, ❦ is U+2766 Floral Heart. The emoji hearts live much higher up, from U+1F493 to U+1F49F, with the later colours scattered above them. Every code point is shown beside its character in the grid.

The red heart is stored here as two code points, U+2764 followed by U+FE0F, because that is what it takes to guarantee the picture form. If you ever paste a heart and get a plain outline where you expected red, that trailing character is what went missing.

Frequently Asked Questions About Heart Symbols

How do you type ♡?

There is no short Alt code for it. On Windows, Alt and 9825 on the numeric keypad, or type 2661 and press Alt+X in Word. On a Mac, Ctrl+Cmd+Space opens the Character Viewer. On Linux, Ctrl+Shift+U then 2661. Phones have no keyboard route, so copying it is the practical answer. The solid ♥ is far easier — Alt and 3.

Is ❤ an emoji or a symbol?

Both, depending on what follows it. On its own, U+2764 is a text character that takes your text colour. Followed by U+FE0F it becomes ❤️, the red emoji. The two are listed separately above so you can pick the one you actually want.

What is the difference between ♥ and ❤?

♥ is a card suit, encoded for printing bridge and poker notation, and it has no emoji form. ❤ was encoded as a typographic ornament and later became the basis of the red heart emoji. ♥ will always match your text; ❤ may not.

Why is ♥ called a black heart when it looks red on my phone?

Because "black" in a Unicode name means solid rather than outline — the opposite of ♡, White Heart Suit. Some phone keyboards substitute a red emoji glyph for it anyway, which is a font decision rather than anything in the character itself.

Which heart symbols work everywhere?

♡ ♥ ❤ ❥ ❣ ❦ ❧ are old enough that essentially every font has them. The colour hearts 🩷 🩵 🩶 are the most recent additions and are the ones most likely to show as an empty box on an older device.

Why did my heart turn into a different colour after I sent it?

Each platform draws the emoji hearts with its own artwork, so the same character can be a slightly different shade on Android, iOS and Windows. The text hearts avoid this completely, since they are drawn by the font as ordinary characters.

Related Collections for Heart Symbols

♥ is a playing-card suit first, so the full deck alongside spades, diamonds and clubs is on the card symbols page. For a heart written in a decorative alphabet rather than as a single character, the heart text generator and heart font build it out of styled letters. ❦ sits close to the ornaments on the flower symbols page, and the rest of the collections are indexed at symbol collections.