What ♌ means
It points to the Leo sign, with room for a joke. Next to a name it simply says “this person is a Leo.” After a dramatic self-description, it plays on astrology's stereotype of Leo as confident, generous and fond of the spotlight. Astrology also gives Leo the Sun as its ruling body, which is why sunny imagery clusters around it.
Where did the Leo sign come from?
From a lion Babylonian astronomers already saw in these stars. Their star lists name a Great Lion here, and Greek myth later identified it with the Nemean lion killed by Heracles. Astrology's signs are equal twelfths of the Sun's yearly path, counted from the spring equinox; Earth's slowly wobbling axis has moved that starting point against the stars. So the Sun now crosses the actual Leo constellation from about mid-August to mid-September.
Astrology shorthand that can sound proud or playful.
If your reader may not know zodiac signs, write “Leo” once.
What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsCombination ideas
3Worth knowing
- The characters behind ♌ existed in Unicode 17 years before anyone was allowed to draw them in colour: Unicode 1.1 in 1993, emoji presentation in 2010.
- ♌ is a single code point, so it survives copying through almost anything — old databases, SMS gateways, printer drivers.
Questions people ask
1When is Leo season?
About July 23 to August 22 in Western astrology. The Sun's exact entry time changes yearly, so the start can fall on July 22 or 23. Indian sidereal astrology's Simha begins around mid-August.
How to type ♌
:leo:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.♌Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.