As a common

symbol A symbol is a mark, sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, object, or relationship. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or seen by creating linkages between otherwise very different conc ...

throughout typographic history, the

heart shape The heart symbol is an ideograph used to express the idea of the "heart" in its metaphorical or symbolic sense. Represented by an anatomically inaccurate shape, the heart symbol is often used to represent the center of emotion, including affe ...

has found its way into many character sets and encodings, including those of Unicode. Some characters depict the shape directly, others reference it in a more derived manner.

History

In the 1990s, NTT DoCoMo released a pager that was aimed at teenagers. The pager was the first of its kind to include the option to send a pictogram as part of the text. The pager only had a single pictogram on its options, which was a heart-shaped pictogram. This is thought to be Shigetaka Kurita's first exposure to the use of digital symbols in text form. The pager received rave reviews in Asia which led to other companies in the region to consider using pictograms in the list of text characters. NTT DoCoMo then released another pager aimed at businesspeople, but this time dropped the heart pictogram from the characters on the pager. Following its release, there was an outcry by users that the pictogram was no longer available, and many customers switched to other providers that had now included a heart pictogram in their markup. This led NTT DoCoMo to reverse their decision and include the heart pictogram. As the emoji became more popular, other heart colours were launched by Unicode. Since then, each heart color has been given its own meaning. In early 2022, Middle Eastern news publications suggested that sending a Red Heart emoji on WhatsApp in Saudi Arabia could amount to harassment and if convicted, the sender could serve a maximum sentence of two years in jail.

Notable characters

Red heart

The red heart (❤️) emoji is an ideogram that is used in communication to express care and as a romantic or love gesture. It is frequently seen as the most popular

emoji An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversat ...

in surveys conducted by NTT DoCoMo.

Smiling face with heart-shaped eyes

The Heart Eyes (😍) emoji is to express happiness towards something. The Unicode Consortium listed it as the third most used emoji in 2019, behind the Red Heart and Face with Tears of Joy emoji. It frequently appears in the top 10 lists for the most common emoji.

Encoding

A common emoticon for the heart is <3. In Unicode several heart symbols are available in text format: In Code page 437, the original character set of the IBM PC, the value of 3 (hexadecimal 03) represents the heart symbol. This value is shared with the non-printing End-of-text character, ETX control character, which overrides the glyph in many contexts.

List of heart related emojis

The single Unicode character heart related

s can be found on the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs, Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs, and Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A ranges.

References

{{emoji navbox category:heart symbols