Flower Symbols

What the seven actually are

A search of character names across this plane finds two with FLOWER in the name and four florettes. That is the whole harvest, and it is not one family. U+2698 FLOWER is the one literally named for it. U+2055 FLOWER PUNCTUATION MARK is not a symbol at all in Unicode’s accounting: its general category is Po, Punctuation Other. U+2618 SHAMROCK is a clover, leaves rather than petals. The remaining four — U+273E, U+273F, U+2740 and U+2741 — are florettes, and their names carry the petal count, so you know what U+2741 EIGHT PETALLED OUTLINED BLACK FLORETTE is before you paste it.

All seven are East Asian width N, one cell each, and all seven are three bytes in UTF-8.

Black and white mean solid and hollow

U+273F BLACK FLORETTE and U+2740 WHITE FLORETTE are the same flower drawn filled and drawn outlined. Neither has a colour of its own: both take the colour of the text around them, so a white florette on a white background disappears and a black one on black does the same. The words in the name describe the drawing, not the ink.

The category split is the one that bites

Six of the seven are So, Symbol Other. U+2055 is Po. That single difference decides what code does to them: a routine that strips punctuation with a \p{P} class removes the flower punctuation mark and leaves the six symbols standing, and one that strips symbols with \p{S} does exactly the reverse. Slug generators, search tokenizers and username validators all make that same split, so a character that survives one filter is the one that will not survive the other.

There is no rose here

Rose, tulip and cherry blossom are not in this set and cannot be added to it — they exist only as emoji, outside the range this page covers. The difference is practical rather than a matter of taste. An emoji flower is four bytes in UTF-8 rather than three, so a text column limited to three-byte sequences accepts every character in the grid above and rejects the rose. If a platform substitutes a colour emoji font for one of these seven, what appears is that platform’s picture; the codepoint you pasted has not changed, only what was drawn for it.

Nearby

At small sizes a florette and a star are hard to tell apart and they are not the same characters: star symbols has the ones actually named for stars, and the decorative marks people set beside them are on aesthetic symbols. Both sit with the rest of the general reference on symbols to copy and paste.