Love symbols — <3 ♡ ღ ∞ and love kaomoji

This page is about the symbols people use to say love — the typed <3, the faces that hug and blush, the letters borrowed from other alphabets because they look like hearts, and the couple and forever marks. For the heart characters themselves — ♡ ♥ ❤ in every colour, with code points — the heart symbols page has the full set.

Almost none of these is a heart character. ღ is a Georgian consonant, ꨄ is a Cham letter, ᰔ is Lepcha and ∞ is a mathematics symbol. That is not trivia: a letter behaves like text, takes the colour of your words and passes a username filter, while an emoji is a fixed-colour picture that many name fields strip out.

How to use love symbols

• Bio: ღ and ∞ sit quietly beside a name without shouting.
• Messages: a kaomoji carries tone that a single ♡ cannot.
• Display name: <3 and ‹3 have never been stripped by any filter.
• Captions: ⚭ and ∞ read as commitment without a word.

If it must survive a strict name field, use <3 ♡ ღ ∞. If it must stay in colour, use 💌 💍 💋.

The typed heart — <3 and ‹3

Before there were emoji there was <3 — a less-than sign and the digit three, turned on its side. It is still the most typed love symbol there is, because every keyboard already has both characters and no filter has ever stripped them.

You will also see ‹3. That first character is not a less-than sign: it is U+2039 SINGLE LEFT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK, a proper typographic quote mark. It sits narrower and higher than <, so the heart looks tidier next to lowercase letters — which is exactly why it took over in bios. Both are plain text and both survive fields that reject emoji.

The same trick gives you the broken version, </3, and the doubled <33 for emphasis.

Love kaomoji — faces that hug and blush

These are the faces people actually send: hugging, blushing, holding out a heart. They are kaomoji — built from ordinary letters and marks, not pictures — so they paste into a caption, a display name or a message without an app.

If part of a face arrives as an empty rectangle, that device is missing a font for one of its characters and the copy itself is still intact.

Love symbols borrowed from other alphabets

Half the love symbols in circulation are not heart characters at all. They are letters from writing systems that have nothing to do with romance, borrowed because their shape reads as a heart. Knowing which is which matters: a letter behaves like text and passes a username filter, an emoji usually does not.

ღ is the one worth remembering. It is a Georgian consonant, in continuous use as a letter for centuries, and it became an internet love symbol purely by accident of shape.

Couple, ring and forever symbols

The symbols for couples, weddings and forever. Note that two of them are plain text rather than emoji: ⚭ and ⚮ come from genealogy notation, so they take your text colour and survive fields that strip pictures.

Ready-made love lines for a bio

Ready-made lines for a bio or a caption. Tap to copy the whole thing.

For the heart characters themselves — every colour, every code point and the difference between ♡ and ❤️ — see heart symbols. For bows and pastel frames to wrap around them, see coquette symbols.

Symbol meanings