Heart emoji colors and their meanings
Red heart is the default for love and the safest heart for almost anything, from a partner to a post you liked. Pink is softer and sweeter, a crush or a cute reply. Orange and yellow read as warm care and friendship rather than romance, which is why yellow became the classic best-friend heart. Green is platonic, cheerful, and also used for nature, vegan food and Irish pride.
Blue stands for trust, loyalty and calm affection, and often for a team or a cause in blue. Light blue is a pastel, gentle version. Purple carries compassion and is tied to BTS fans through “borahae” (I purple you). Brown is used for warmth, coffee and autumn, and for solidarity with Black and brown communities.
Black covers grief, dark humour, goth style or simply an aesthetic choice. Grey is muted and a little melancholy. White means pure, quiet love and is the usual heart for sympathy and condolences. None of these meanings are fixed rules: the person and the context decide more than the colour does.
What the special heart emoji mean
Broken heart is heartbreak, disappointment or a dramatic “that hurts”. Mending heart (the heart with a bandage) means healing after a breakup, illness or a hard time, and works for get-well messages. Heart on fire is burning passion or something you love intensely.
Two hearts and revolving hearts show love going both ways. Beating, growing and sparkling hearts add excitement. Heart with arrow is Cupid’s shot, being smitten; heart with ribbon is love as a gift. Heart exclamation is an emphatic heart, sometimes read as a heart with a dot under it. Heart hands and finger heart are the gestures, the second one the K-pop style finger heart.
Heart text symbols you can copy and paste
Not every place shows colour emoji. Game nicknames, some bios, usernames and old systems need text hearts, and these are plain Unicode characters: and (the card-suit hearts), (a rotated heart bullet), , ღ (a Georgian letter that looks like a drawn heart), , and the floral hearts , old printers’ ornaments that look elegant between lines.
appears in black or red depending on the font, while with the emoji variation selector becomes a red emoji. If a heart shows up as an empty box, the device lacks a font for it; and are the most widely supported. The oldest heart of all is typed, not copied: <3 is a heart turned on its side, and many chat apps convert it to automatically.
How to type a heart symbol on a keyboard
On a phone, the hearts are in the emoji keyboard; search “heart”. On Windows, press Win . to open the emoji panel, or hold Alt and type 3 on the numeric keypad for . On a Mac, press Control Command Space. In HTML, ♥ gives .
The quickest way on any device is to copy a heart from this page and paste it where you need it.
Where the hearts came from
(Heavy Black Heart) and the card hearts were already in Unicode 1.1 in 1993, inherited from typography and the Zapf Dingbats font. Most coloured and animated hearts ( ) arrived with Unicode 6.0 in 2010, taken from Japanese mobile emoji. followed in 2016, in 2017, and in 2019, and in 2020, and in 2022, which completed the rainbow.
Symbols
42Click a symbol to copy it and open its page.
How to use them
6 situationsClick to copyHeart Emoji & Symbols combos
14Worth knowing
- is one of the most used emoji in the world: Unicode’s 2021 frequency data ranked it second, right after .
- The floral heart is a hedera or “aldus leaf”, an ivy-leaf ornament that scribes and printers used to separate paragraphs long before emoji.
- ღ is not a heart at all but the letter “ghan” of the Georgian alphabet; people adopted it for its shape.
- Red is still officially named Heavy Black Heart in Unicode; it only turns red when shown as an emoji.
Questions people ask
8What do the heart emoji colors mean?
romantic love, sweet affection, and friendship and care, platonic or nature, trust and loyalty, compassion (and BTS), warmth and solidarity, grief or dark style, muted feelings, pure love and sympathy.
How do I copy and paste a heart emoji?
Tap or click any heart on this page to copy it, then paste it into your message, bio or document with a long press or Ctrl/Cmd V.
What is the heart symbol text?
Text hearts are Unicode characters like ღ and the floral . They work in plain text, usernames and games where colour emoji are not allowed. The typed version is <3.
What does the white heart emoji mean?
stands for pure or quiet love, and it is the most common heart for sympathy, mourning and condolences. It also suits minimal, clean aesthetics.
What does the black heart emoji mean?
can mean sorrow and grief, dark humour, a goth or emo style, or just a love of black. Context tells which.
What does the heart with a bandage emoji mean?
is the mending heart: recovering from heartbreak, illness or a hard time, or wishing someone a full recovery.
What does the heart emoji with a dot under it mean?
That is , the heart exclamation: a heart used as an exclamation mark, so an emphatic “love this!”.
How do you make a heart symbol on a keyboard?
On Windows hold Alt and type 3 on the numeric keypad for , or press Win . for emoji. On a Mac press Control Command Space. On phones use the emoji keyboard and search “heart”.
