symbol explained
Heart Symbol
A solid text heart for affection, favorites, cards and decorative labels.
- Unicode
- U+2665
- HTML entity
- ♥
Try Heart Symbol
Edit the text, then change the font and size.
The short answer
What does Heart Symbol mean?
The heart symbol ♥ is a plain-text character used for love, affection, favorites and the heart suit in playing cards. Unlike a colorful heart emoji, it normally follows the color and size of the surrounding text.
Background
Where it comes from
The character is Unicode U+2665, BLACK HEART SUIT. Its roots are in card-suit typography, but digital writing broadened its meaning into a compact sign of affection and appreciation.
In conversation
How to use it
Copy it into captions, names, navigation labels or simple love notes. Choose ♥ when you want a typographic heart; choose a heart emoji when color or a more specific emotional shade matters.
Realistic examples
Heart Symbol in a sentence
“made with ♥”
“Oslo ♥”
“music / books / coffee ♥”
Tone & nuance
What it communicates
Warm, classic and direct. It can be romantic, friendly or purely decorative depending on the words and symbols around it.
Easily confused
Characters that look like ♥
These are separate characters. However similar they render, they sort, search and compare differently — which is why pasting the wrong one is so easy to miss.
Red heart emoji
U+2764 U+FE0F
The emoji keeps its own colour and size wherever it is pasted. ♥ follows the surrounding text, which is why it suits a typographic line and the emoji does not.
White heart suit
U+2661
The hollow counterpart. Same shape, no fill, and a much lighter presence in a line of text.
Rotated heavy black heart bullet
U+2765
A decorative bullet with a small tail, often used in bios where ♥ would look plainer.
For developers
♥ in code
Each value is generated from the character itself, so it stays correct even where a file encoding cannot hold the symbol directly.
| Format | Value | When to use it | Copy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode | U+2665 | 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 | \2665 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{2665} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %E2%99%A5 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Common questions
Heart Symbol FAQ
What does the heart symbol ♥ mean?
The heart symbol ♥ is a plain-text character used for love, affection, favorites and the heart suit in playing cards. Unlike a colorful heart emoji, it normally follows the color and size of the surrounding text.
How do I type ♥?
The fastest way is the copy button on this page, which puts ♥ on the clipboard on its own, without a label or a stray space. To insert it by hand, use the code point U+2665. In HTML you can write ♥ instead of pasting the character. Windows Character Map and the macOS Emoji & Symbols viewer both let you search for it by name.
Will ♥ look the same everywhere?
♥ is plain text, not an image, so it takes on the font, size and colour of the words around it while keeping the code point U+2665 wherever it is pasted. A font with limited coverage can substitute a different glyph or show an empty box, and some apps restyle certain symbols as coloured emoji, so preview it in the app and theme your readers will actually use.
Keep exploring