Maltese Cross

From a medieval order of Christian knights who ran a hospital. In the 11th century, merchants from Amalfi, a seafaring city in southern Italy, backed a hospital for pilgrims in Jerusalem. The brotherhood that ran it became the Knights Hospitaller, or Order of St John, and carried Amalfi's eight-pointed cross. After losing the Holy Land and then Rhodes, the knights ruled Malta from 1530 until 1798, and the cross took the island's name.

The Order explains the eight points as the eight Beatitudes (the blessings in Jesus's Sermon on the Mount), as virtues expected of a knight, or as its eight "langues", the historical groupings of its knights by nation. Today the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and the St John ambulance and first-aid organisations still wear it, and it appears in coats of arms, military and civil decorations, and fire-department badges, especially in the United States.

What does ✠ mean in a message or text?

Usually a badge of faith, heritage or service, not a mood. In Christian texts the character can have a practical job: in some prayer books and service books it marks the moment the priest blesses or makes the sign of the cross, and many bishops traditionally put a cross before their signature, which in type is often shown as ✠.

Elsewhere, read it from what surrounds it: the words next to it decide whose badge it is.