Spade Suit Emoji
The spade suit from a deck of cards, for card games and gambling.
Try Spade Suit emoji
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Meaning & usage
What does the Spade Suit emoji mean?
The spade suit from a deck of cards, for card games and gambling.
Formal and graphic. Card posts use it literally, and design posts use it as a shape.
How to use ♠️ naturally
Poker posts, card games and design use as a plain black shape.
Reaction symbols work like visual emphasis: they reinforce a word, rate an idea or replace a short response. Repetition normally increases intensity, but it can also make a message feel more performative.
From standard to slang
The history of ♠️
- 2010
First defined as emoji
According to Unicode’s Emoji Versions data, Spade Suit 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
One of four suit symbols that have existed in typography for centuries and reached Unicode long before emoji. The black suits show in colour only with a variation selector, which is why they sometimes appear as plain glyphs.
- Today
How its use evolved
Poker posts, card games and design use as a plain black shape.
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.
Flush, and I still lost ♠️
Bridge night, bring biscuits ♠️
Tattoo, small, on the wrist ♠️
When to use it
Using ♠️ clearly
Poker posts, card games and design use as a plain black shape. It lands as spade emoji or ♠️ meaning 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 spade suit emoji
What does ♠️ mean in a text message?
The spade suit from a deck of cards, for card games and gambling. Formal and graphic. Card posts use it literally, and design posts use it as a shape.
Is ♠️ always positive?
Not always. Its usual readings are spade emoji, ♠️ meaning, card emoji, and irony or the relationship between the people can flip any of them.
Why does ♠️ look different on another device?
U+2660 U+FE0F 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 spade suit 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 spade suit 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+2660 U+FE0F | 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 | \2660 \FE0F | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{2660}\u{FE0F} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %E2%99%A0%EF%B8%8F | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Reference card
Emoji details
- Unicode
- U+2660 U+FE0F
- Category
- Symbols & Reactions
- Also known as
- spade emoji♠️ meaningcard emoji
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