Card Suit Symbols

Eight consecutive codepoints, four suits, two fills

The suits run without a gap from U+2660 to U+2667, and the order inside that run is
worth reading carefully, because it is not four filled suits followed by four hollow ones. It goes
spade, heart, diamond, club, then spade, heart, diamond, club again — and the fills alternate:
filled, hollow, hollow, filled, then hollow, filled, filled, hollow. The second group is the exact
complement of the first, suit for suit.

So U+2660 BLACK SPADE SUIT and U+2664 WHITE SPADE SUIT are one shape in two fills, and the same holds for the other
three suits. If you copy a run of four from the start of the block you get one of each suit, but a
mixture of fills.

WHITE and BLACK mean hollow and filled

Unicode’s names use WHITE for an outlined shape and BLACK for a solid one, throughout the
standard and not only here. Neither word says anything about colour, and no character in this set
carries a colour: ♥ and ♦ are drawn in whatever colour the surrounding text is.
Red comes from styling the text, or from the emoji form of the character, which is a different
thing again. If a suit has to be red on the page, that is a decision about the text colour, not
about which of the eight characters you paste. The same convention applied to the hearts is on
black and white heart symbols.

The two diamonds break the width pattern

Six of the eight carry East Asian Width Ambiguous, meaning they take one cell in a Western font
context and a full cell where East Asian text is expected. The two diamonds do not: U+2662 and
U+2666 are both Neutral width. In ordinary prose this is invisible. In a monospace column —
a terminal table of hands, a fixed-width scoreboard — it means a row of spades and a row of
diamonds can end at different places once the font context changes. If a layout has to hold,
either avoid mixing the two width classes or use the diamonds throughout.

What is not in this set

The card faces themselves are separate characters. The ace of spades, the queen of hearts and
the rest live outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, one codepoint per card, and none of them is
here; these eight are the suit marks only. There is also no joker mark, no card back and no deck.

All eight are general category So, so a pattern matching maths symbols will not find
them, and not one of the eight defaults to colour: U+2665 defaults to a text glyph, and so does every other
suit here. A suit turns into a colour picture only when U+FE0F is placed after it — a second and
invisible character, not a different suit. That is why the same codepoint can arrive flat from one
source and coloured from another, and why a field that counts characters can return a number you
did not expect.

The two hearts here are the same characters as on heart symbols,
which covers the other six heart shapes. For the other set of game-piece characters see
chess symbols, and the full reference is at
symbols to copy and paste.