Hearts (♥)
Hearts, ♥, one of the four suits of a standard pack of cards: a red heart. In contract bridge it ranks second, below spades.
Easily confused with
How to read it
Hearts and diamonds are the red suits of a standard pack, spades and clubs the black. The heart is older than the French pack: the earliest German cards already had hearts, with bells, leaves and acorns, Britannica’s 1911 edition says, and German packs still call the suit Rot, red. The French name is coeur. Unicode encodes the solid sign as U+2665 BLACK HEART SUIT, with “valentine” as another name, and the outlined ♡ as U+2661 WHITE HEART SUIT; the emoji ♥️ is named “heart suit”.
Also searched as: ♥, black heart suit, card heart symbol, coeur, hearts symbol, heart suit.
Look-alikes
The red heart emoji, ❤️, is a different character, U+2764 HEAVY BLACK HEART, which Unicode’s names list cross-refers from the heart suit. The red heart page covers what it means in messages.
Where hearts rank
In contract bridge hearts rank second, below spades and above diamonds and clubs, under the World Bridge Federation’s laws. In Preference and 500 hearts rank highest, John McLeod notes for the International Playing-Card Society.
Why two red suits
When the French took up card games from Spain, Merlin wrote in a passage Willshire’s 1876 British Museum catalogue quotes, they had to divide their four suits into a red group, hearts and diamonds, and a black group, spades and clubs. In those games the red cards counted like the Spanish cups and coins, the black like swords and clubs.
Read next
- Next in Playing card suitsDiamonds (♦)Diamonds, ♦, one of the four suits of a standard pack of cards: a red diamond standing on one point. In contract bridge it ranks third, above clubs.
- The same shape in Honda dashboard symbolsHonda Maintenance Minder codesThe codes Honda’s Maintenance Minder shows with the wrench: a main code for the oil service (A or B on a US car) and numbered sub-codes for other maintenance due at the same time.
More playing card suits
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols drawn with curves and waves.
Sources
- Cards, Playing, Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition (1911), vol. 5, pp. 324–326 (Wikisource transcription), Encyclopædia Britannica (Wikisource), p. 325, marks of the suits
- A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and Other Cards in the British Museum, by W. H. Willshire, Trustees of the British Museum, London, 1876 (scan on the Internet Archive), General history: marks, designs, etc., pp. 30–34
- An introduction (playing-card FAQ), formerly at cs.man.ac.uk/playing-cards, now hosted by the IPCS, International Playing-Card Society, National suit systems
- The Laws of Duplicate Bridge 2017, Law 1, The Pack, World Bridge Federation, Law 1A, Rank of Cards and Suits
- What is the order of suit ranking? (answer by John McLeod), playing-card FAQ, International Playing-Card Society, answer
- Unicode Character Database: NamesList.txt, Unicode Consortium, 2661, 2665
- emoji-test.txt, Emoji Keyboard/Display Test Data for UTS #51, version 18.0, 30 April 2026, Unicode Consortium, game
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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