Heart symbols to copy and paste

♡ and ♥ sit in Unicode next to ♠ and ♣ because they began as playing-card suits. They are ordinary characters, so they follow the font, size and colour of the text around them: white on a dark-mode screen, black in light mode. The coloured hearts, from ❤️ to 🩶, are emoji. The phone draws each one as a small picture, so it keeps its colour everywhere and looks a little different on an iPhone, a Samsung and a Pixel.

Two hearts can go either way. ❤ was a plain black ornament in Unicode’s Dingbats block in the early 1990s, almost two decades before it became the red heart emoji, and ♥ has an emoji form called heart suit. An invisible character after the heart decides which you get: U+FE0F asks for the emoji, U+FE0E for plain text. The ♥︎ and ❤︎ in the first set carry U+FE0E. Many apps honour the request and some ignore it, so check a draft before you post.

A phone can only draw the emoji its software knows about, and anything newer appears as an empty box or a box with a question mark. The text hearts have been in Unicode since the early 1990s, so they are the safe choice. The newest emoji hearts are the ones most likely to fail.

Heart on fire and mending heart are not single characters. Each is ❤️ joined to 🔥 or 🩹 by an invisible joiner, which is why they are in the table but not in the copy grid. A phone that doesn’t know the pair shows the two emoji side by side, which still gets the idea across.

• ღ is the Georgian letter ghan. It looks like a curly heart, but in Georgian it is part of ordinary words, and a screen reader may announce it as a letter.
• The wings in ʚ♡ɞ are two phonetic letters from Unicode’s IPA Extensions block, borrowed for their shape.
• ❦ and ❧ are printers’ ornaments called hederas, from the Latin for ivy. Printers used them to mark paragraphs and section breaks, and they still make a quiet divider in a caption.
• <3 is a heart typed on its side: the < is the point and the 3 is the two rounded tops. </3 adds the crack.

• Stick to one kind per profile. A row of matching ♡ looks deliberate; ♡ next to ❤️ next to 💖 looks accidental.
• Use a text heart as a separator between facts, as in “mum ♡ teacher ♡ plant hoarder.” It stays the same colour as the words in both light and dark mode.
• Use an emoji heart when its colour means something, such as 💚 for a plant shop or a heart that matches your logo.
• Hearts can’t go in an Instagram username, which allows only a–z, 0–9, periods and underscores. The name field and the bio both accept them.

Tip: Screen readers announce every symbol by name, so five ♥ in a row can be read out as “black heart suit” five times. One heart usually says enough.