science

Hearts in Unicode

Hearts in Unicode is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Hearts in Unicode rather than just read about it. In short: As a common symbol throughout typographic history, the heart shape has found its way into many character sets and encodings, including those of Unicode. Some characters depict the shape directly, others reference it in a more derived manner.

Key takeaways

Hearts in Unicode belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Hearts in Unicode to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Hearts in Unicode from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

As a common symbol throughout typographic history, the heart shape has found its way into many character sets and encodings, including those of Unicode. Some characters depict the shape directly, others reference it in a more derived manner.

History In the 1990s, NTT DoCoMo released a pager that was aimed at teenagers. The pager was the first of its kind to include the option to send a pictogram as part of the text. The pager only had a single pictogram on its options, which was a heart-shaped pictogram. This is thought to be Shigetaka Kurita's first exposure to the use of digital symbols in text form. The pager received rave reviews in Asia which led to other companies in the region to consider using pictograms in the list of text characters. NTT DoCoMo then released another pager aimed at businesspeople, but this time dropped the heart pictogram from the characters on the pager. Following its release, there was an outcry by users that the pictogram was no longer available, and many customers switched to other providers that had now included a heart pictogram in their markup. This led NTT DoCoMo to reverse their decision and include the heart pictogram. As the emoji became more popular, other heart colours were launched by Unicode. Since then, each heart color has been given its own meaning. In early 2022, Middle Eastern news publications suggested that sending a Red Heart emoji on WhatsApp in Saudi Arabia could amount to harassment and if convicted, the sender could serve a maximum sentence of two years in jail.

Notable characters

Red heart

The red heart (❤️) emoji is an ideogram that is used in communication to express care and as a romantic or love gesture. It is frequently seen as the most popular emoji in surveys conducted by NTT DoCoMo.

Smiling face with heart-shaped eyes The Heart Eyes (😍) emoji is to express happiness towards something. The Unicode Consortium listed it as the third most used emoji in 2019, behind the Red Heart and Face with Tears of Joy emoji. It frequently appears in the top 10 lists for the most common emoji.

Hairy heart

Unicode 6.0 used black and white references, therefore it represented yellow and other colors with the hatching pattern of heraldic or. When developing the yellow heart emoji ⟨💛⟩, Google misinterpreted the dots in Unicode's reference images ⟨⟩ and displayed this emoji as a pink "hairy heart" starting from version 4.4 KitKat. This error was fixed in version 4.4.1 a few months later.

Ideographic scripts Some ideographic scripts include pictographs of hearts.

U+2F3C KANGXI RADICAL HEART U+5FC3 心 CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-5FC3 U+13123 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH F034

Encoding A common emoticon for the heart is <3. In Unicode several heart symbols are available in text format:

In Code page 437, the original character set of the IBM PC, the value of 3 (hexadecimal 03) represents the heart suit symbol. This value is shared with the non-printing ETX control character, which overrides the glyph in many contexts.

List of heart-related emojis

The single Unicode character heart related emojis can be found on the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs, Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs, and Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A ranges.

See also The playing cards in Unicode include characters for the cards of the heart suit of the French deck.

References

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Hearts in Unicode

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Hearts in Unicode claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Hearts in Unicode before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Hearts in Unicode ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Hearts in Unicode

In research: Hearts in Unicode appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Hearts in Unicode in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Hearts in Unicode is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Heart symbols, Unicode, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Hearts in Unicode outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Hearts in Unicode in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Hearts in Unicode means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Hearts in Unicode out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Hearts in Unicode in simple terms?

Why does Hearts in Unicode matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Hearts in Unicode?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Hearts in Unicode.