Terms of endearment: ​The changing online language of hearts

Sheera Frenkel

For as long as people have connected digitally, there have been ways to show love, with the heart being the most universal. The distinctive curves-and-point symbol was birthed in the 14th century when the Italian physician Guido da Vigevano wrote a treatise on the dissection of a heart and drew it in the now-familiar shape. How people make hearts, and the mediums they are shared through, have shifted as new technologies have emerged. In the late 1800s, operators of the first electrical telegraphs used Morse code to send each other love messages by tapping out the word “heart.”

As the internet age dawned in the 1990s, heart-like images constructed with letters and numbers began catching on in AOL chat rooms. In the 2010s, a red heart was one of the first emojis developed. Over the past decade, as social media has become increasingly visual with photos and videos, teenagers have used their hands and bodies to fashion heart symbols to post on Instagram and TikTok. The ways they bend their wrists, fingers and joints have become increasingly complex as they seek out unique ways to say “I love you.”

“It’s hard to say ‘I love you’ without it feeling cringe,” said Quinn Sullivan, 21, a college student and TikTok creator from College Station, Texas. “We’re always looking for a new way.” Here’s how the language of hearts has changed online over the years.

In AOL chat rooms in the 1990s, text ruled. So people found ways to make hearts through the keys available on their keyboards. Two crucial ones were the < symbol and the number 3, which together made an emoticon heart <3. The keys had been used since the days of typewriters to depict the symbol, said Parker Higgins, an artist and activist who has studied the history of text encoding.

AOL also popularized a new type of art made with standard text, such as semicolons, commas and dashes, to create images known as ASCII (pronounced ass-key). These images could portray a shrug or a rose in a single line. But they could also take up dozens of lines to depict elaborate hearts with arrows piercing them or roses woven in. Teenagers had to be in the know to successfully clip and save those hearts, and new ones were constantly being created, Mr. Higgins said. “People would copy and iterate on versions of the hearts by putting them in their AOL away messages or profiles,” he said.

As mobile phones became popular earlier this century, emojis — small images that could appear alongside text — were born. Among the first to be drawn was a red heart, created in 1999 by a Japanese artist, Shigetaka Kurita. Heart emojis did not become widely available until 2010 when a Google software team petitioned to get emojis recognized by the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit that functions like the United Nations in maintaining text standards across computers. Once the group recognized the emojis, they became widely available on mobile devices, and then were quickly adapted by social media companies like Facebook.

The red heart emoji is the second most used in the world, according to polls from the Unicode Consortium. Today, the red heart is one of the most popular emojis. It was the second most used in the world in 2019 and 2021, according to polls by the Unicode Consortium, beaten only by the “crying/laughing” face, which teenagers have since declared is not cool. (The consortium does not have a poll for 2022.)