What Is This Emoji? 66 Real Unicode Names

You saw a symbol, you want to use it, and you cannot search for it because you do not know what it is called. That is the actual problem — not finding symbols, but naming the one you already have. Below is every character’s real Unicode name and code point, checked against the standard rather than guessed.

Last updated: 30 August 2026 · COOLMOJI Editorial Team

The lookup table

Grouped by what people mistake for each other. Every name and code point below was read from the Unicode character database, not written from memory — which matters, because wrong character names are the single most-copied error in this niche. Tap the button in the last column to copy the character.

Hearts

Stars

Ticks and crosses

Dashes and dots

Look-alike maths

Flowers

Arrows

Name brackets

Moons

Music

Marks people misread

Three names that surprise everybody

The gaming “wings” are Egyptian hieroglyphs. The bracket pair 𓆩 𓆪 that wraps thousands of game names is U+131A9 and U+131AA, formally EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH L006. They were encoded so Egyptologists could typeset ancient texts. Nobody involved was thinking about clan tags.

The ornate name frame is Javanese. ꧁ and ꧂ are JAVANESE LEFT RERENGGAN and JAVANESE RIGHT RERENGGAN — decorative marks from the Javanese script used to open and close a passage of text. They arrived in Unicode to support a living writing system, then found a second life in gamer names.

The filled heart is a card suit. ♥ is BLACK HEART SUIT — it exists because playing cards needed it, alongside spades, clubs and diamonds. The hollow ♡ is WHITE HEART SUIT, its pair. Neither was designed to mean affection; that came later from the people using them.

There is a pattern here worth noticing. Almost every decorative character people use today was encoded for an entirely different, usually scholarly reason. They are borrowed, not designed for this.

Why the real name is worth knowing

Two practical reasons, beyond the pleasure of knowing.

You can search for it. Knowing that ✧ is WHITE FOUR POINTED STAR lets you find its neighbours in the same block — and the neighbours are usually what you actually wanted.

The name predicts the behaviour. This is the useful one. A character whose name says SUIT or OPERATOR is old, from a widely supported block, and will render nearly everywhere. A character whose name says EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH sits far outside the basic plane, which is exactly why it gets rejected by name fields and shows as a box on older phones. The name tells you the risk before you test it.

Our post on the skull emoji and gothic symbols works through one case of this in detail: 💀 and ☠ look related and behave completely differently, and their names say why.

84 neighbours from the same blocks

This is the payoff of knowing a character’s real name. Once you know ✓ is CHECK MARK, the useful move is to look at what sits beside it in the standard — because the neighbours are usually what you actually wanted. These are drawn from the same blocks as the characters in the table above. Tap to copy.

Tick & cross neighbours

Cross marks

Music neighbours

Dagger & marks

Corner neighbours

Quote marks

How to identify one we have not listed

1. Copy the character on its own. Just the one, with no spaces around it — a second invisible character will confuse every lookup.
2. Search the code point, not the picture. Any character inspector will give you the U+ number. That number is unique and unambiguous; a description of what it looks like is neither.
3. Check it against the standard itself. The Unicode code charts are the source; every other site is quoting them, sometimes wrongly.

That last step is our own rule too. Our editorial policy explains why we never take character names from other symbol sites: one wrong name gets copied outward and becomes very hard to dislodge, because the only way to notice is the lookup everybody skipped.

FAQ

Why does the same character have different names on different sites?

Because most sites use a nickname rather than the formal name, and nicknames drift. There is exactly one official name per character, fixed when it was encoded and never changed.

Is the Unicode name the same as what people call it?

Often not, and both are useful. BLACK HEART SUIT is the name; “heart” is what people call it. The formal name is what you search with; the everyday name is what you communicate with.

Why do some names say “black” for a symbol that is not black?

In Unicode, black means filled and white means hollow, regardless of the colour it renders in. BLACK STAR ★ and WHITE STAR ☆ are solid and outlined versions of the same shape.

How do I find a character if I only have a picture of it?

Shape-based search tools exist for exactly this. Once you have a candidate, copy it and check the code point — a lookalike will have a different number.

Do emoji have Unicode names too?

Yes. 🌙 is CRESCENT MOON, ⭐ is WHITE MEDIUM STAR. Emoji are characters like any other; the picture is just the vendor’s interpretation of the name.