Hearts in Unicode
Emoji and others representing or depicting heart shapes
As a common symbol throughout typographic history, the heart shape has found its way into many character sets and encodings, including those of Unicode. Some characters depict the shape directly, others reference it in a more derived manner.
01History
In the 1990s, NTT DoCoMo released a pager that was aimed at teenagers. The pager was the first of its kind to include the option to send a pictogram as part of the text. The pager only had a single pictogram on its options, which was a heart-shaped pictogram. This is thought to be Shigetaka Kurita's first exposure to the use of digital symbols in text form. The pager received rave reviews in Asia which led to other companies in the region to consider using pictograms in the list of text characters. NTT DoCoMo then released another pager aimed at businesspeople, but this time dropped the heart pictogram from the characters on the pager. Following its release, there was an outcry by users that the pictogram was no longer available, and many customers switched to other providers that had now included a heart pictogram in their markup. This led NTT DoCoMo to reverse their decision and include the heart pictogram.
As the emoji became more popular, other heart colours were launched by Unicode. Since then, each heart color has been given its own meaning.
In early 2022, Middle Eastern news publications suggested that sending a Red Heart emoji on WhatsApp in Saudi Arabia could amount to harassment and if convicted, the sender could serve a maximum sentence of two years in jail.
02Notable characters
Red heart
The red heart (β€οΈ) emoji is an ideogram that is used in communication to express care and as a romantic or love gesture. It is frequently seen as the most popular emoji in surveys conducted by NTT DoCoMo.
Smiling face with heart-shaped eyes
The Heart Eyes (π) emoji is to express happiness towards something. The Unicode Consortium listed it as the third most used emoji in 2019, behind the Red Heart and Face with Tears of Joy emoji. It frequently appears in the top 10 lists for the most common emoji.
Hairy heart
Unicode 6.0 used black and white references, therefore it represented yellow and other colors with the hatching pattern of heraldic or. When developing the yellow heart emoji β¨πβ©, Google misinterpreted the dots in Unicode's reference images β¨β© and displayed this emoji as a pink "hairy heart" starting from version 4.4 KitKat. This error was fixed in version 4.4.1 a few months later.
03Ideographic scripts
Some ideographic scripts include pictographs of hearts.
- U+2F3C KANGXI RADICAL HEART
- U+5FC3 εΏ CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-5FC3
- U+13123 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH F034
04Encoding
A common emoticon for the heart is <3. In Unicode several heart symbols are available in text format:
| Glyph | Description | HTML code | Alt codes |
|---|---|---|---|
| β¦ | U+2766 FLORAL HEART | ❦ | |
| β§ | U+2767 ROTATED FLORAL HEART BULLET | ❧ | |
| β | U+2619 REVERSED ROTATED FLORAL HEART BULLET | ☙ | |
| β‘ | U+2661 WHITE HEART SUIT | ♡ or ♡ | |
| β₯ | U+2665 BLACK HEART SUIT in device default representation | ♥ or ♥ or ♥ | Alt + 3 |
| β₯οΈ | U+2665 BLACK HEART SUIT in explicit plaintext representation | ♥︎ | |
| β₯οΈ | U+2665 BLACK HEART SUIT in explicit emoji representation | ♥️ | |
| β€ | U+2764 HEAVY BLACK HEART in device default representation | ❤ or ❤ | |
| β€οΈ | U+2764 HEAVY BLACK HEART in explicit plaintext representation | ❤︎ | |
| β€οΈ | U+2764 HEAVY BLACK HEART in explicit emoji representation | ❤️ | |
| β₯ | U+2765 ROTATED HEAVY BLACK HEART BULLET | ❥ or ❥ | |
| β£ | U+2763 HEAVY HEART EXCLAMATION MARK ORNAMENT | ❣ or ❣ | |
| π | U+1F394 HEART WITH TIP ON THE LEFT | 🎔 |
In Code page 437, the original character set of the IBM PC, the value of 3 (hexadecimal 03) represents the heart suit symbol. This value is shared with the non-printing ETX control character, which overrides the glyph in many contexts.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article βHearts in Unicodeβ, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
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