Heart Symbols

What each kind of heart is for

The hearts above come from several different parts of Unicode, and that history explains how they behave.

♥ and ♡ are the heart suit from playing cards. They sit in the Miscellaneous Symbols block (U+2665 and U+2661) and have been in character sets since the DOS era. Because they are so old, almost every font draws them, which makes them the safest choice when you cannot test the recipient’s device. ♥ is solid; ♡ is the outline and reads as lighter and more delicate, so it is common in usernames and bios.

❤ and ❥ come from the Dingbats block, a set of ornaments borrowed from a printer’s font collection. ❤ is a heavy, rounded heart. ❥ is a rotated heart bullet that leans and trails a small curl, and people use it as a divider or a bullet before a line of text. ❣ is a heart used as the dot of an exclamation mark.

❦, ❧ and ☙ are floral hearts, which are really leaf-shaped printer’s ornaments. They are useful as section dividers in a bio, not as a way to say “love”. ღ is not a symbol at all but the Georgian letter ghan, borrowed because its two curls look like a pair of hearts. It works for decoration, but a Georgian reader will see it as a letter.

The card suits ♠ ♣ ♦ ♥ are shown together because the outline and solid pairs (♤ ♧ ♢ ♡) are often wanted as a set, for example in game names or poker-themed text.

Coloured hearts such as 🧡 💚 and 💜 were added as emoji, so they have no text form: the platform always paints them, in its own style. 🖤 and 🤍 are the usual way to get a black or white heart in colour-emoji form.

Text hearts and emoji hearts

This is the question that sends most people to a page like this one. Some characters exist in two presentations: a plain text glyph that follows your font and text colour, and a colour emoji picture drawn by the operating system. ❤ is one of them. By default Unicode treats U+2764 as text, but phones and most chat apps substitute the red emoji, so you often see red even though you copied what looks like a plain heart.

Two invisible characters, called variation selectors, can ask for a specific form:

Treat these as requests, not commands. Some apps strip variation selectors on paste, some ignore U+FE0E and draw the emoji anyway, and a few display a stray box if the selector is not handled. If you need a heart that will not turn red, the practical answer is not to fight it: use ♥ or ♡, which have no emoji form that apps will swap in by default.

The selector also matters when you count characters. U+FE0F is a code point of its own, so “❤️” is two code points even though it looks like one character. For fields with a tight limit, see our character limits guide.

Where hearts work

Hearts are among the best-supported symbols, but “supported” means different things in different places.

• Bios and display names. Social platforms generally accept ordinary Unicode symbols like ♥ and ♡, and many people use them. Rules for what a name field accepts are set by each platform and can change without notice, so check the result after saving rather than assuming. Our Instagram fonts and Discord fonts pages record what we have documented for those fields.
• Games. Name rules vary widely between games and often filter characters. Some allow a heart, some strip it, some replace it with a placeholder. We cannot promise any particular game accepts a given symbol; test it in the name-entry screen. The Free Fire name styles page covers one popular case.
• Documents and email. Word processors and mail clients handle ♥ without trouble because it is in nearly every font. Rarer ornaments depend on font fallback, and a recipient without a suitable font may see a box.
• Websites you build. In HTML you can write the heart as an entity (♥ for ♥) or paste the character directly with UTF-8 set. Use a text symbol rather than an image where you can, so it scales and recolours with your CSS.

How to type a heart

You do not have to copy from a page. Several built-in methods work:

1. Windows Alt code. With Num Lock on, hold Alt and type 3 on the numeric keypad, then release. This produces ♥ in many programs because it maps to the legacy DOS character set. It is a short list: Alt+4, 5 and 6 give ♦, ♣ and ♠. Alt codes need a physical numeric keypad and do not work in every app, so do not rely on them for the other hearts here.
2. Windows emoji panel. Press the Windows key and the period key. The Symbols tab includes some general symbols, and the search box finds emoji hearts.
3. Word on Windows. Type the hex code (2665), then press Alt and X to convert it to ♥. Other hearts in this page work the same way with their code points.
4. Mac. Press Control, Command and Space to open the emoji and symbols viewer, then search “heart”. The Character Viewer’s Symbols section can also be browsed by category.
5. iPhone and Android. The emoji keyboard has hearts; its search field finds them by name. Text-style hearts such as ♥ are usually found on the symbols page of the standard keyboard, which varies by keyboard app.
6. Text replacement. On iOS and macOS you can set a shortcut such as “hrt” that expands to ♡ wherever you type.

Accessibility

Screen readers announce symbols by their names, so your heart arrives as spoken words. ♥ is typically read as “black heart suit”, ♡ as “white heart suit”, and the emoji ❤️ as “red heart”, though the exact wording differs between NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver and TalkBack. Three practical rules follow:

• Put hearts at the end of a line rather than in the middle of a name, so the name is heard first.
• Keep runs short. Five hearts in a row is five announcements.
• Do not replace the word “love” with a heart in anything that must be understood, such as a form label or a link. Decorative is fine; load-bearing is not.

Our fancy text accessibility guide goes further on this for styled letters.

Using hearts with styled text

Hearts pair naturally with decorated names. The text decorator wraps a name with heart symbols and other ornaments for you. If you are building something with several symbol types, the star symbols and arrow symbols pages work the same way, and the symbols hub explains how this section is organised.