๐ broken heart
Meaning
One of the most universally understood emojis โ used globally for heartbreak, loss, and sadness. Context shifts the weight from devastating grief to light disappointment.
Keywords: break, broken, crushed, emotion, heart, heartbroken, lonely, sad
๐ก Did you know?
๐ was standardized in Unicode 6.0 in 2010, making it one of the earliest emojis designed specifically to encode a negative emotion with a heart motif.
๐ก Did you know?
In early 2025, a meme spread on TikTok declaring ๐ had gone 'too mainstream' as a symbol of performative sadness โ ironic users migrated to the wilted flower ๐ฅ to signal in-group distance from earnest heartbreak posts.
Articles featuring this emoji
How it's used around the world
Japan
In Japan, heart emojis skew strongly toward romantic love, so ๐ tends to mean specifically romantic heartbreak rather than general sadness or friendship loss.
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