Valentine's Symbols

Where these characters come from

This set spans the monochrome hearts from Miscellaneous Symbols — encoded alongside the card suits, since a heart is one of them — and the much later coloured emoji hearts in their various shades and decorations.

How reliably they render

The monochrome hearts are among the most reliably rendered characters in Unicode and behave exactly like text. The coloured hearts are emoji and vary in artwork between platforms, though the colour itself is consistent, so a red heart is red everywhere.

Questions

Why ♥ is a playing-card suit

The black heart suit (U+2665) was encoded alongside the spade, club and diamond, because a heart is one of the four French card suits and card games had to be representable in plain text. Its presence in Unicode has nothing to do with romance; the romantic reading is something readers brought to a character that was already there for bridge and poker notation. That origin is exactly why it behaves like text — inheriting your colour, sitting properly on the baseline — while the emoji hearts, added decades later for a different purpose, do not.

Heart colours mean nothing standardised

Unicode assigns no meaning to a heart beyond its colour. Every reading you have encountered — which colour signals friendship, which signals something more — grew up informally inside particular platforms and communities, and none of it is specified anywhere. The conventions also differ sharply between age groups and between countries, and they change faster than any documentation of them. If a distinction matters to what you are saying, say it in words: a colour that reads one way to you may read differently, or as nothing at all, to the person receiving it.

Code points and HTML entities

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