As a common

symbol A symbol is a mark, Sign (semiotics), sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, physical object, object, or wikt:relationship, relationship. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or seen by cr ...

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 affecti ...

has found its way into many character sets and encodings, including those of

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

. Some characters depict the shape directly, others reference it in a more derived manner.

History

In the 1990s, NTT DoCoMo released a

pager A pager, also known as a beeper or bleeper, is a Wireless communication, wireless telecommunications device that receives and displays Alphanumericals, alphanumeric or voice messages. One-way pagers can only receive messages, while response p ...

that was aimed at teenagers. The pager was the first of its kind to include the option to send a

pictogram A pictogram (also pictogramme, pictograph, or simply picto) is a graphical symbol that conveys meaning through its visual resemblance to a physical object. Pictograms are used in systems of writing and visual communication. A pictography is a wri ...

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 Asia ( , ) is the largest continent in the world by both land area and population. It covers an area of more than 44 million square kilometres, about 30% of Earth's total land area and 8% of Earth's total surface area. The continent, which ...

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

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

. Since then, each heart color has been given its own meaning. In early 2022,

Middle East The Middle East (term originally coined in English language) is a geopolitical region encompassing the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq. The term came into widespread usage by the United Kingdom and western Eur ...

ern news publications suggested that sending a Red Heart emoji on

WhatsApp WhatsApp (officially WhatsApp Messenger) is an American social media, instant messaging (IM), and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service owned by technology conglomerate Meta. It allows users to send text, voice messages and video messages, make vo ...

Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia, officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is a country in West Asia. Located in the centre of the Middle East, it covers the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula and has a land area of about , making it the List of Asian countries ...

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 An ideogram or ideograph (from Ancient Greek, Greek 'idea' + 'to write') is a symbol that is used within a given writing system to represent an idea or concept in a given language. (Ideograms are contrasted with phonogram (linguistics), phono ...

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 modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from type ...

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 The Unicode Consortium (legally Unicode, Inc.) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization incorporated and based in Mountain View, California, U.S. Its primary purpose is to maintain and publish the Unicode Standard which was developed with the in ...

listed it as the third most used emoji in 2019, behind the Red Heart and

Face with Tears of Joy The face is the front of the head that features the eyes, nose and mouth, and through which animals express many of their emotions. The face is crucial for human identity, and damage such as scarring or developmental deformities may affect the ...

emoji. It frequently appears in the top 10 lists for the most common emoji.

Encoding

A common

emoticon An emoticon (, , rarely , ), short for emotion icon, is a pictorial representation of a facial expression using Character (symbol), characters—usually punctuation marks, numbers and Alphabet, letters—to express a person's feelings, mood ...

for the heart is <3. In

several heart symbols are available in text format: In

Code page 437 Code page 437 ( CCSID 437) is the character set of the original IBM PC (personal computer). It is also known as CP437, OEM-US, OEM 437, PC-8, or MS-DOS Latin US. The set includes all printable ASCII characters as well as some accented letters (di ...

, the original character set of the IBM PC, the value of 3 (hexadecimal 03) represents the heart suit symbol. This value is shared with the non-printing 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 Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs is a Unicode block containing meteorological and astronomical symbols, emoji characters largely for compatibility with Japanese telephone carriers' implementations of Shift JIS, and characters originally from ...

Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs is a Unicode block containing emoji characters. It extends the set of symbols included in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block. It also includes Typikon symbols. Emoji The Unicode 14.0 Supplemental ...

, and

Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A is a Unicode block containing emoji characters. It extends the set of symbols included in the Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs block. All of the characters in the Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A block a ...

ranges.

References

{{Emoji navbox category:Heart symbols Unicode