Flower Emoji & Symbols

The red and pink flowers carry feeling. 🌹 rose is the love flower, serious or flirtatious depending on who sends it. 🌷 tulip is gentler: spring, Mother's Day, "thinking of you". 🌸 cherry blossom is the soft pink flower of Japanese spring and of every pastel aesthetic bio, and 🌺 hibiscus is the tropical one, the flower of Hawaii, luaus and beach holidays (Hawaii's real state flower is yellow; the emoji is red or pink on every platform).

The yellow pair is 🌻 sunflower, warmth and summer and since 2022 a sign of support for Ukraine, whose national flower it is, and 🌼 blossom, which looks like a daisy on most phones and is what people mean by "daisy emoji" or "yellow flower emoji". The purple flower is 🪻 hyacinth, added in 2022 because there was no purple flower at all; people use it for lavender, lilac and wisteria too. 🪷 lotus is pink-and-white and stands for calm, meditation, yoga and Buddhism.

Then come the flowers that are not quite flowers. 💐 bouquet is a gift of flowers: congratulations, thank you, get well. 💮 white flower is really a Japanese teacher's stamp, the hanamaru that marks a very good piece of homework; on Apple's and several other designs you can read the red words 大変よくできました, "very well done", in its middle. 🏵️ rosette is a prize ribbon, the kind pinned on a winning horse. And 🥀 wilted flower, the one people search for as "dead flower emoji" or "dead rose", is a drooping, dried-out rose for heartbreak, loss and anything that used to be beautiful.

Flower emoji meaning in texts, on WhatsApp and from a girl or a guy

A flower on its own is friendly and warm. From a girl, 🌸 🌷 🌼 next to a message mostly means softness and good mood, not a hidden signal; 🌹 is the one that leans romantic, and 🌹🌹🌹 or 🌹❤️ from a guy is a plain compliment or a flirt. A single 🌹 under a photo is the classic "you look beautiful". 💐 means gratitude or celebration rather than love, so it is the safe flower to send a colleague or your aunt.

🥀 is the sad flower: heartbreak, a breakup, grief, or self-mocking tiredness ("me after Monday 🥀"). In Gen Z captions it has drifted into a general "this is tragic" reaction, next to 💀 and 😭. 🪷 reads as peace and healing, so it turns up in wellness and mental-health posts; 🌻 says positivity and, for many since 2022, solidarity with Ukraine. The Hidden Disabilities Sunflower scheme also uses a sunflower on lanyards, so a 🌻 in a bio sometimes says "I have a non-visible disability".

In Indian group chats and in Tamil and Hindi WhatsApp culture, flower emoji are part of the morning greeting: a 🌸 or 🌺 beside "good morning" or a blessing, with no romantic sense at all. Our Good Morning & Good Night Emoji and Prayer & Blessing Emoji pages have more of those.

Flower text symbols: ✿ ❀ ❁ and the floral hearts

The best-known flower symbols are the five florettes from the Dingbats block, ✿ ❀ ❁ ✾ ❃, drawn by Hermann Zapf for ITC Zapf Dingbats and in Unicode since the first version in 1991. ✿ black florette is the filled one, ❀ white florette the outline, ❁ has eight petals and an outlined rim, ✾ alternates black and white petals, and ❃ is the heavy pinwheel flower. They are text, not emoji: they stay black and white, match the size and colour of the letters around them, and survive in places that strip emoji, which is why they are the flowers of Free Fire and Discord nicknames, Instagram bios and old forum signatures. Our Nickname Symbols and Cute & Kawaii Symbols pages use them heavily.

⚘ flower from the Miscellaneous Symbols block is a plain cut stem with two leaves, and ⁕ flower punctuation mark is an old mark from Indian manuscripts (its Sanskrit name, puṣpikā, means "little flower"). The three floral hearts ❦ ❧ ☙ are printers' fleurons: ❦ is called the hedera, Latin for ivy, because it is in fact an ivy leaf, and typographers have used it to end chapters and separate paragraphs since the early days of printing. ❧ and ☙ are the same leaf turned to point right and left, which makes them good bullets and brackets: ❧ title ☙.

A whole family of asterisks look like flowers once you stop reading them as footnote marks. ✢ ✣ ✤ ✥ are four-petalled, ✻ ✼ ✽ ❃ have teardrop petals, ❉ ❊ ❋ are the rounder balloon and propeller shapes and ✺ is a sixteen-pointed burst that passes for a dandelion or a sunflower head. Mixed into a line they make the flower borders people search for as "flower text copy and paste": ✿❀✿❀✿ or ❀ ✻ ❀ ✻ ❀. The two pictographs at the end of the grid, 🎕 bouquet of flowers and 🏶 black rosette, were encoded in 2014 with the Wingdings and Webdings symbols but never made emoji, so they only show with a symbol font such as Symbola; on most phones they are an empty box.

Greens for the bouquet, visitors, and flowers hiding in other emoji

Real bouquets have greenery, and so do emoji ones. 🌱 seedling is a sprout and the emoji of growth and new beginnings, 🌿 herb is a sprig of leaves, 🍃 leaf fluttering in wind adds movement and fresh air, and 🪴 potted plant (2020) is the houseplant. 🦋 butterfly and 🐝 honeybee are the two creatures that land on flowers in almost every flower combo: 🌸🦋 for a dreamy caption, 🌻🐝 for a sunny one. The rest of the garden, trees, clovers and mushrooms, lives on the Plant & Garden Emoji and Nature Emoji pages.

Four more emoji are flowers in disguise. 🎴 flower playing cards shows a hanafuda card, the Japanese deck whose twelve suits are twelve flowers and plants, one per month. ⚜️ fleur-de-lis is a stylised lily, the emblem of French kings and of New Orleans. 💠 diamond with a dot is officially a cute geometric shape but is widely called the "blue flower emoji" and used as one. 📛 name badge is tulip-shaped because it is the badge Japanese kindergarten children wear; outside Japan people read it as a flower or a fire badge.

Where the flower emoji came from and how to type them

The original eight flowers, 🌸 🌹 🌺 🌻 🌼 🌷 💐 💮, arrived together in Unicode 6.0 in 2010, carried over from the Japanese mobile carriers' emoji sets, which is why a sakura, a hanamaru stamp and a tulip (the first flower every Japanese child learns to draw) are in there while a daisy or a lily is not. 🏵️ rosette came in 2014 with Unicode 7.0, 🥀 wilted flower in 2016 (Unicode 9.0), 🪷 lotus in 2021 (Unicode 14.0) and 🪻 hyacinth in 2022 (Unicode 15.0). A phone that has not been updated since then shows the two newest as a box.

To type a flower emoji, open the emoji keyboard and search for the word: on iPhone tap the emoji key and type "flower" or "rose" into the search field; on Android tap the smiley on Gboard and search the same way; on Windows press Win + . and on a Mac Ctrl + Cmd + Space. The text flowers ✿ ❀ ❁ are not on any keyboard, so copy them from this page or type the code in a Word document (273F then Alt + X gives ✿).