Red heart ❤️

How to read it

❤️ is U+2764, named HEAVY BLACK HEART in the Unicode Standard. The name is older than colour emoji: Emojipedia notes that the character arrived in Unicode 1.1 in 1993, when “black” meant a solid, filled heart, and Unicode’s code chart says it is “displayed with a red color when used in emoji style”. Emojipedia dates it as an emoji to Emoji 1.0 in 2015 and calls it historically the most popular heart emoji by a considerable distance. Its short name in Unicode’s emoji lists is red heart, and its keywords are emotion, heart, love and red. Dictionary.com’s entry gives gratitude, love, happiness, hope and flirtatiousness; in “I ❤️ NY” it stands in for the verb, read as “love” or “heart”. Emojipedia adds that it is often used for feelings that are not romantic at all, partly because it is one of the default reactions on Instagram, Slack and WhatsApp. Dictionary.com notes that people put a heart at both ends of a statement to give it a loving or hopeful tone, which is why it turns up on crowdfunding pages for medical bills and funerals.

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Do heart colours have fixed meanings?

Not according to Emojipedia. In March 2025 the Netflix drama Adolescence had a teenage character explain to his father, a detective, that red means love, purple “horny”, yellow “I’m interested, are you interested”, pink “I’m interested but not in sex” and orange “You’re going to be fine”, and Emojipedia notes that many media reports took the list at face value. Emojipedia’s Keith Broni answered that such colour codes have more in common with digital chain mail than with linguistic truth: all heart emojis convey affection, appreciation or emotional connection, and the colour may add tone but rarely encodes a secret message. What colour does carry is affinity. Emojipedia says each coloured heart is often used for people, places, groups, objects or ideas of the same colour, and Unicode’s 2021 paper on heart emoji (L2/21-075) gives examples of hearts placed side by side for things with no emoji of their own: 🤍❤🤍 for support of Belarus, 💖💙💜 for bisexuality. The same paper adds that coloured hearts are the commonest emoji used outside messages.

❤️ or ♥️

The playing-card heart is a separate character, U+2665 BLACK HEART SUIT, whose short name is heart suit and whose keywords are card, game, hearts and suit. Unicode’s chart gives it the alternative name “valentine” and cross-refers it to ❤️. Emojipedia describes ♥️ as the similar emoji for the heart suit in a deck of cards. Nor has ❤️ been red on every phone. The pink heart proposal (L2/21-203) notes that the Japanese carriers KDDI and SoftBank had pink hearts in their original sets, and that as recently as 2017 Android 7.0 drew this heart in pink. The typed heart <3 has a page of its own.

Snapchat’s red heart

On Snapchat a red heart beside a friend’s name has a fixed meaning set by the app. Snapchat’s support page says it means the two have been each other’s #1 Best Friend for two weeks in a row. Before that comes the yellow heart, for #1 Best Friends, and after two months the pair of pink hearts 💕. Dictionary.com records the same rule.