Try Broken Heart emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Broken Heart emoji mean?
Heartbreak, grief or deep disappointment.
Pain, grief or serious disappointment. It can refer to relationships, loss or a smaller setback described dramatically for humour.
How to use 💔 naturally
Breakups, bad news, losing a match.
Heart emoji express affection, support or enthusiasm, but colour and decoration change the intensity. The same heart can feel romantic with a partner and warmly platonic with a close friend.
From standard to slang
The history of 💔
- 2010
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Broken Heart was first defined as emoji in Emoji 0.6, dated 2010. That label is retrospective: Unicode applied it later to the early mobile core it inherited from the Japanese carriers.
- Before the keyboard
Its visual roots
A heart split by a jagged vertical line. The crack is drawn as a lightning break rather than a clean cut, which is the convention in print cartoons.
- Today
How its use evolved
Breakups, bad news, losing a match.
Dates follow Unicode’s official Emoji Versions chart. Versions before Emoji 1.0 are labelled retrospectively. See the history of emoji.
In conversation
Examples of 💔 in messages
These examples show the emoji in complete messages, where the words make its intended tone easier to read.
I’m going to miss this place 💔
I’m sorry you’re going through that 💔
They cancelled the show after one season 💔
When to use it
Using 💔 clearly
Breakups, bad news, losing a match. It lands as heartbreak or sad when the rest of the message supports that reading, and it is the surrounding words that do the deciding — so in a sensitive, professional or cross-cultural conversation, say the thing outright as well.
Common questions
About the broken heart emoji
What does 💔 mean in a text message?
Heartbreak, grief or deep disappointment. Pain, grief or serious disappointment. It can refer to relationships, loss or a smaller setback described dramatically for humour.
Is 💔 always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are heartbreak, sad, loss, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
What does 💔 mean from a girl or from a guy?
The same thing either way: Heartbreak, grief or deep disappointment. The sender's gender does not change what the character means. What does change it is how well you know each other, what the rest of the message says, and whether either of you is being ironic.
Why does 💔 look different on another device?
U+1F494 identifies the emoji; the picture is a font, drawn separately by Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung. Only the artwork changes, never the character.
How do I copy and paste the broken heart emoji?
Use the copy button at the top of this page. 💔 is a character, not an image, so it pastes into messages, captions and filenames as ordinary text.
When was the broken heart emoji introduced?
Unicode’s Emoji Versions data first records 💔 as emoji in Emoji 0.6, dated 2010. Early emoji version numbers can be retrospective, so this date describes its place in the standardised emoji set rather than the first-ever appearance of the underlying symbol.
For developers
💔 in code
Every value below is generated from the character itself, so it stays correct even where a file encoding cannot hold the emoji directly.
| Format | Value | When to use it | Copy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode | U+1F494 | The standard reference. Use it to search a character map or a spec. | |
| HTML (hex) | 💔 | For HTML and XML. Safe in files that are not saved as UTF-8. | |
| HTML (decimal) | 💔 | The same reference in decimal. Both render identically. | |
| CSS | \1F494 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F494} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %F0%9F%92%94 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+1F494
- Category
- Hearts & Love
- Also known as
- heartbreaksadloss
Put it in a message
When 💔 is the right choice
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