Black Heart Emoji

What does the Black Heart emoji mean?

The Black Heart emoji (🖤) depicts a black heart and belongs to the Smileys & Emotion category of the Unicode emoji standard. It is a widely recognised symbol that works across modern devices and platforms. Technically it is encoded at Unicode code point U+1F5A4 and was added in Emoji 1.0 (2015), so every up-to-date system can display and exchange it reliably. Because tone is hard to convey in plain text, this emoji functions as digital body language. It is often paired with greetings, apologies, thanks, or reactions to add empathy and reduce friction in fast-moving conversations. On Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft and other vendors the artwork differs slightly — colour palette, shading, and line weight change — but the core concept of black heart stays identical, so the emoji remains universally readable. You can copy this emoji as the character itself (🖤), as an HTML entity (🖤), or as a shortcode (:black-heart:) for platforms like Slack, Discord, and GitHub.

This detailed meaning was written by the UseEmoji editorial team after reviewing Unicode CLDR data and real-world usage. For quick identification, think of this emoji as shorthand for black heart — it conveys that idea faster than words while keeping the message friendly and scannable.

How to use the Black Heart emoji

• In chat: Drop 🖤 into a sentence where you would normally write “black heart” to add tone and visual interest.
• On social media: Pair 🖤 with a keyword or hashtag to make captions more searchable and expressive.
• In documents and code: Use the HTML entity 🖤 or shortcode :black-heart: when the raw character may be escaped or unsupported.

Technical details & cross-platform notes

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