Try Broken Heart emoji
Edit the text, then change the size.
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.
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
Keep browsing