The changing online language of hearts

The way to display a heart, the universal symbol of love, has changed on the internet over the years, driven by new technology.

February 14, 2023

Take your middle fingers and bend each one down at the bottom knuckle at a steep angle. Then take your index fingers and arch them down to touch them. The rest of your hands curl out of sight.

The resulting shape, a heart, is unmistakable. And for Generation Z, it’s become one of the few great ways to express love online today.

For as long as people have connected digitally, there have been ways to show love, the most universal being the heart. The distinctive symbol of curves and points was born 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.

The way people make hearts and the means through which they are shared have changed as new technologies have emerged. At the end of the 19th century, the operators of the first electric telegraphs used morse code to send each other love messages by touching the word “heart”.

As the Internet age dawned in the 1990s, heart-shaped images constructed of letters and numbers began to become popular 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, teens have used their hands and bodies to create heart symbols to post on Instagram and TikTok. The ways they bend their wrists, fingers, and joints have become increasingly complex as they search for unique ways to say “I love you.”

“It’s hard to say ‘I love you’ without feeling ashamed,” said Quinn Sullivan, 21, a college student and TikTok creator from College Station, Texas. “We are always looking for a new way.”

This is how the language of hearts has changed online over the years.

in the chat room

In AOL chat rooms in the 1990s, he would send the text. 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 formed a <3 heart emoticon. Keys have been used since the days of typewriters to represent 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 hyphens, to create images known as ASCII (pronounced ass-key). These images could represent a shrug, tsu, or a rose, @>—>—, on a single line. But they could also occupy dozens of lines to represent elaborate hearts with arrows through them or interwoven roses.

Teenagers had to be informed to successfully cut and save those hearts, and new ones were constantly being created, Higgins said. “People were copying and iterating versions of the hearts by placing them in their messages or AOL profiles,” she said.

The age of emoji

As mobile phones became popular at the turn of 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 didn’t become widely available until 2010, when a Google software team requested that the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit organization that functions like the United Nations to maintain text standards on computers, recognize the emojis. Once emojis were recognized by the group, they became widely available on mobile devices and were then quickly adapted by social media companies like Facebook.

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 surveys by the Unicode Consortium, surpassed only by the “crying/laughing” face that teenagers have since. declared not cool. (The consortium does not have a survey for 2022.)

“The red heart is the most original emoji,” said Jennifer Daniel, chair of the Unicode Consortium’s emoji subcommittee. “Now we have a lot of variations, like blue, green, and purple hearts. We have broken hearts and cupid hearts. But the red heart emoji has a different meaning that conveys something beautiful around the world.”

Tik Tok Shapes

There are acceptable ways to show hearts on social media now, and ways that aren’t. Often it is determined by your age.

“If you want to know how old someone is, but you don’t want to ask them directly, ask them to make a heart out of their hands,” said Julia Carolan, 25, a social media influencer from New York, in a TikTok video of the last year.

During the next 21 seconds of the video, Ms. Carolan demonstrated that if someone formed a heart with all the fingers on both hands, it meant that person was “a millennial…an adult.” Only Generation Z, she said, makes hearts using only the middle and index fingers, as if it were a secret code.

The video, which has received more than 40,000 likes, is one of hundreds on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and other social media sites discussing the proper way to make a finger heart.

“The funny thing is that I can barely make the Gen Z heart with my hands. Maybe it’s because I’m almost a millennial myself,” Carolan said in an interview. “The thing now, with TikTok and these videos, is that you’re really putting yourself, your face and your body. Whatever you’re doing, especially if it’s showing love, it has to feel authentic.”

In some regions, people have their own ways of making hearts to post on social media. In parts of Asia, for example, hearts are formed by pinching the thumb and index finger together.

Every year brings a new and trendy way for teens to create heart shapes to post online, said Mr. Sullivan, the creator of TikTok.

“Part of it is the exclusivity, especially early on, to only a small group of people who know what the new symbol or hand motion is,” he said. “The minute it gets too big, it gets scary.”

But the old can also become new. There has been a resurgence recently of “old hearts” in videos, such as the <3 emoticon, Mr. Sullivan said.

“Like everything vintage, it’s making a comeback,” he said.