Flower Symbols

Where the flower characters come from

Most flower symbols in text are not from a botanical collection. They come from the Dingbats block (U+2700 to U+27BF), which Unicode took from printers’ ornament fonts. The block holds a whole family of petalled shapes: the black and white florettes ✿ and ❀, the eight-petalled ❁, the teardrop-spoked ❃, the heavy ❋ and several asterisk-like blossoms ✻ ✼ ✽ ✾. Their names describe the drawing, such as “eight petalled outlined black florette” for ❁, so you cannot always guess which is which from the name alone.

The single true flower is ⚘ (U+2698, FLOWER), a small stem with a bloom, sitting in the Miscellaneous Symbols block. ☘ (SHAMROCK) is a three-leaf clover; people use it for luck or Irish themes rather than for flowers. ❦, ❧ and ☙ are floral hearts: printers used them as leaves and page ornaments, and they look like leaf sprigs more than blossoms.

The coloured flowers are emoji from a different part of Unicode, mostly added since 2010. They have no text form: the platform paints them in its own artwork, so the 🌹 on an iPhone does not match the one on Android or Windows.

Choosing a flower for the job

Text and emoji presentation

A few flower characters straddle the line. ☘ (U+2618) and ⚘ (U+2698) are text characters, but ☘ has an emoji form too, and on many phones it will turn green. Unicode provides two invisible variation selectors to ask for either form: U+FE0E for text and U+FE0F for emoji. The request is a hint, and some apps strip or ignore the selector. The Dingbat florets in the first group have no emoji form, so they stay in your text colour everywhere that has the glyph.

If a coloured flower is what you want, use the emoji. If you want a flower that will match the text in a quote image or a coloured name, use a floret.

Flowers in bios, names and borders

Florets are popular in aesthetic bios because they sit comfortably at the same height as lowercase letters. Place one at the start and end of a short phrase, or between short items, as a separator. A single repeated shape looks tidier than a mix: ✿ ✿ ✿ reads as a pattern, while ✿ ❀ ❃ ❁ ✾ reads as noise.

The last group contains multi-character strings rather than single code points. For these the label is a plain description of what the string looks like, not an official name, because there is no Unicode name for “floret between curl brackets”. The curl brackets are ⊱ and ⊰ from the Mathematical Operators block, borrowed because they resemble small curled leaves. The smiling face is a kaomoji, a face assembled from symbols, and relies on ◕ and ‿ being present in the viewer’s font.

Platforms vary in what their name or bio fields accept, and we do not have verified limits for every service. The text decorator can wrap a name in these shapes for you, and the aesthetic symbols page has more bracketed frames to combine them with.

How to type a flower

1. Windows, Word. Type the code point and press Alt then X. 273F gives ✿, 2740 gives ❀, 2741 gives ❁, 2698 gives ⚘.
2. Windows emoji panel. Press the Windows key and the period key, switch to the symbols or kaomoji tabs, and search for flower for emoji blossoms.
3. Mac. Search “florette” in the Character Viewer (Control, Command and Space) to find the Dingbat flowers.
4. iPhone and Android. The emoji keyboard has coloured flowers. For text florets, copy from this page or add a text replacement such as “flwr” that expands to ✿.
5. HTML. Write ✿ for ✿, or paste the character in a UTF-8 page.

No legacy Alt code produces a flower, so ignore lists that claim otherwise.

Accessibility

Screen readers say what the character is called. ✿ may be read as “black florette” and ❀ as “white florette”, though wording varies between NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver and TalkBack. A line such as “✿ ❀ ✿ welcome ✿ ❀ ✿” is read as a stream of florette announcements before the actual words. Keep decorative flowers to one at each end, avoid putting them in the middle of a word, and never use one in place of text that has to be understood, such as a label or a link. See the fancy text accessibility guide for the wider picture.