Heart Symbols: Different Types and Their Meanings

Send the wrong colour heart to the wrong person and you’ll learn, quickly, that not all hearts say the same thing. Heart symbols range from the classic card-suit ♥ you’ll find in a deck of playing cards to a rainbow of emoji hearts that each carry their own tone — romantic, friendly, supportive, even sarcastic. Add outline hearts, broken hearts, and growing hearts, and you’ve got a small emotional vocabulary that most of us use daily without ever being taught it.

This guide separates the text symbols from the emoji, explains what the colours have come to mean, and shows you how to type the ones that are actually characters on any device.

The Classic Text Heart Symbols

Long before emoji, hearts existed as plain text characters. These are the ones that behave like letters: they take your font’s size and colour, they work in documents, and they copy and paste reliably.

The black heart suit ♥ (U+2665) is the elder of the family. It comes from playing cards — hearts are one of the four suits, alongside spades, clubs, and diamonds — and video games adopted it for health and lives, which is why ♥♥♥ above a game character means three lives left. In text, ♥ reads as a straightforward “love.” People have typed it for decades, including in the era of symbol fonts; there’s a whole story about picture alphabets in Wingdings history if you enjoy that side of things.

The white heart suit ♡ (U+2661) is the outline twin. Because it’s hollow, it feels softer — affection rather than passion, a like rather than a love. Scrapbookers, journallers, and K-pop fan culture use ♡ constantly, often in strings, where ♥ might feel too heavy.

The heavy black heart ❤ (U+2764) is plumper and rounder. On many platforms it doesn’t stay black at all — systems display it as a big red emoji heart. That’s your first clue that the boundary between “symbol” and “emoji” is blurry, and we’ll come back to it.

What the Coloured Emoji Hearts Mean

Here’s where culture takes over from Unicode. Technically, coloured hearts like 💙 are emoji presentations of heart code points — the colour is part of the emoji design, not a separate text character. Practically, each colour has grown its own reputation. None of these meanings are official rules; they’re conventions, and conventions shift between friend groups and platforms. But these are the readings you’re most likely to run into:

• ❤️ Red heart — the default. Romantic love, deep affection, or strong general love for family and close friends. The safest “I love this” there is.
• 🧡 Orange heart — warmth and friendship, love with the intensity turned down. Often read as caring but not romantic — the heart you send when red feels like too much.
• 💛 Yellow / gold heart — friendship, happiness, sunshine. Closely associated with best-friend affection, and on some apps a “best friends” marker.
• 💚 Green heart — nature, health, growth, and sometimes support for environmental causes. Also used for team colours and, in some contexts, jealousy — context decides.
• 💙 Blue heart — trust, loyalty, calm, and support. Frequently used for causes, awareness campaigns, and by sports teams whose colour is blue.
• 💜 Purple heart — compassion, luxury, and glamour; also the symbol long associated with a well-known K-pop fandom’s “I purple you” expression of lasting love, and in the US it connects to the Purple Heart military medal, so it can carry a respectful tone too.
• 🖤 Black heart — dark humour, grief, edgy aesthetics, or stylish minimalism. Between close friends it’s often just a favourite colour choice; in a condolence context it reads as mourning.
• 🤍 White heart — purity, peace, sympathy, and remembrance. Common in memorial posts and gentle, supportive messages.
• 🤎 Brown heart — warmth, earthiness, representation, and support for diversity, plus straightforward chocolate-and-autumn aesthetics.
• 💗 Growing / pink hearts — 💗 (growing heart) suggests feelings that are swelling; 💕 (two hearts) is flirty and affectionate; 💖 (sparkling heart) adds excitement and glitter to the affection.

A sensible rule: match the heart to the relationship, not just the feeling. Red to a partner, yellow or orange to a friend, blue or white for support — and when in doubt with colleagues, no heart at all is a legitimate choice. If you want to explore how emoji differ from font symbols in the first place, Wingdings vs. emoji untangles that neatly.

Hearts That Aren’t About Romance

Several heart characters do jobs that have nothing to do with sending love:

• 💔 Broken heart (U+1F494) — heartbreak, obviously, but also everyday disappointment: a cancelled concert, a rained-out trip. The crack does the emotional work.
• ❤️‍🩹 Mending heart — recovery and healing, used when someone is getting better or working through something.
• 🫀 Anatomical heart — the realistically drawn organ, used in medical contexts, science posts, and by people who find the cartoon shape too cute.
• ♥ as a game counter — lives and health, inherited from cards via arcade games.
• Heart as a “like” — the button you tap on social platforms. Here the heart simply means approval, and tapping hundreds a day has drained it of romance entirely.

Heart Symbols vs. Emoji Hearts: Why It Matters

Why care whether a heart is a “text symbol” or an “emoji”? Three practical reasons:

1. Documents behave differently. In Word, a report, or a spreadsheet, ♥ and ♡ will sit in line with your text, resize with it, and print cleanly. Emoji hearts may appear larger, in colour, or as boxes on older systems.
2. Colour control. A text heart inherits your chosen colour. Style ♥ in red in a document and it stays red everywhere. An emoji heart’s look is decided by the platform — Apple, Google, and Samsung all draw it differently.
3. Compatibility. Plain symbols have been supported for decades. If your audience includes older devices or plain-text email, ♥ is the safer traveller — the same logic explained in why symbols show as boxes.

For chat and social posts, use emoji hearts freely — colour is the whole point there. For anything formal, published, or printed, reach for the text versions.

How to Type Heart Symbols

• In Word: type the hex code and press Alt+X — 2665 Alt+X gives ♥, 2661 gives ♡, 2764 gives ❤.
• In Office generally: Insert > Symbol, look in the Miscellaneous Symbols / Dingbats area, and pick your heart.
• On Mac: Ctrl+Cmd+Space opens the Character Viewer; search “heart” and you’ll get both text symbols and emoji, clearly separated.
• On phones: the emoji keyboard’s symbols / emoticons section holds the coloured hearts. Long-pressing can reveal variants on some keyboards.
• Copy and paste: for a one-off, copying ♥ from this page is entirely respectable — it’s a real character, and it stays a heart wherever it lands.

Hearts sit alongside the other great symbol families, too — if ticks and stars are also in your regular rotation, the guides to check mark symbols and star symbols follow the same pattern of tables, meanings, and typing shortcuts.

A Very Short History of the Heart Shape

Oddly, the ♥ shape looks nothing like a real heart. Historians have suggested links to the shape of ivy leaves (an ancient symbol of fidelity), the seed of the silphium plant used in the ancient world, or simply stylised artwork that stuck. What we know for sure is its career: it appeared in art centuries ago, playing cards standardised it, and the “I ♥ NY” slogan of the 1970s turned it into a verb — “I heart” now means “I love” in plain speech. Few symbols have ever been promoted from picture to grammar. The Unicode Consortium’s charts show just how large the heart’s extended family has become.

Using Hearts Tastefully in Design and Writing

A heart is punctuation with emotion, so dose it like punctuation. One ♥ at the end of a thank-you card lands warmly; a paragraph trailing seven hearts reads as breathless. In design, outline hearts ♡ suit light, airy layouts — wedding stationery, wellness brands, baby announcements — while solid hearts anchor bold, confident designs like sale banners and charity appeals. On websites, a heart icon universally signals “save to favourites” or “like,” so don’t use it for anything else on a button; users will misread your intent instantly. And if you’re rating or ranking something, that’s not a heart’s job at all — stars are the established rating symbol, which is why hotels and reviews use them instead.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does the black heart 🖤 mean when someone sends it?

Usually one of three things: dark or dry humour, a grieving or serious tone, or simply an aesthetic preference for black. Among close friends it’s often meaningless beyond style. If it arrives after bad news, read it as sympathy and mourning.

Which heart should I send to a friend instead of a romantic partner?

Yellow 💛 and orange 🧡 are the widely understood friendship hearts. Pink hearts are affectionate but light. The classic red ❤️ can read as romantic, so many people save it for partners and family — though plenty of close friends use it freely. Know your audience.

How do I type the ♥ symbol in a Word document?

Type 2665 and press Alt+X, or use Insert > Symbol. For the outline heart ♡, the code is 2661 followed by Alt+X. These are text characters, so they’ll match your document’s font size and can be coloured like any letter.

Why does ❤ sometimes appear black and sometimes red?

❤ (U+2764) is a text character that many platforms choose to display in emoji style — big and red. In plain-text environments it shows as a heavy black heart. Same character, different presentation, decided by the app or device you’re using.

What does 💜 mean in K-pop fandom?

Purple became strongly associated with BTS and their fans after a member coined the phrase “I purple you,” using purple — the last colour of the rainbow — to suggest trust and love that lasts a long time. Fans worldwide now use 💜 as a badge of that fandom and its message.

Is it unprofessional to use heart symbols at work?

The text symbols ♥ and ♡ in an internal, friendly context are usually harmless, but emoji hearts in client emails, reports, or formal documents can look casual in the wrong way. When in doubt, let words do the work in professional writing and save hearts for chat.

Conclusion

Heart symbols split neatly into two tribes: the dignified text hearts — ♥, ♡, ❤ — that belong in documents, and the expressive coloured emoji hearts that belong in conversation, each colour carrying its own shade of meaning. Learn which tribe fits your situation, remember that colour is a message in itself, and you’ll never send an accidentally romantic orange-or-red mix-up again.