What ♍ means
It names Virgo, the Maiden of the zodiac.
If someone sends you ♍ right after learning your birthday, they are naming your sign. In a horoscope caption, it labels the sign being discussed instead. Read the nearby words before assuming it's about you.
Where does the Virgo symbol come from?
From astrology's old sign glyphs; its exact origin is unknown.
Virgo is the sixth of the twelve signs, named after the Virgo constellation. Since antiquity the constellation has been pictured as a young woman holding an ear of wheat, and its brightest star, Spica, means "ear of grain" in Latin. The horoscope dates follow the sign, not the stars: the Sun now enters the constellation itself around mid-September.
The glyph is an M-like shape with a looped or crossed final stroke. One proposed reading sees a monogram of the first letters of the Greek word parthenos, "maiden"; a stylized wheat ear has also been suggested. Neither is proven.
Casual astrology shorthand, suited to profiles and birthday teasing.
♍ alone does not tell you how someone feels about you.
What it means when someone sends it to you
2 readingsDon't confuse it with
1Worth 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
1Why does ♍ look different on other phones?
Every platform draws its own artwork for the same code point. The character you send is identical; Apple, Google, Samsung and WhatsApp each render it in their own style.
How to type ♍
:virgo: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.