Plus Emoji

➕ is the Heavy Plus Sign. It means addition, more, increase, positive, and "add something good." It's the most optimistic symbol in the math emoji family: where ➖ takes away, ✖️ scales, and ➗ splits, ➕ only ever grows the thing on the other side of it. That's why it's used so much further beyond math than you'd expect: on pharmacy signs, on medical kits, on every "add" button in every app, in pro/con lists, on dating profiles, and on the cover of Ed Sheeran's debut album.

The symbol has two stories that run in parallel. The first is mathematical. Johannes Widmann printed + for the first time in 1489 in his mercantile arithmetic textbook published in Leipzig. The shape came from the Latin word et ("and"), which scribes had been compressing into a ligature for centuries. The crossbar of the t eventually ate the rest of the word. The second story is religious and medical. The Greek cross (equal-armed +) predates arithmetic as a Christian symbol, and in the 19th century it was adopted as the emblem of the International Red Cross by Henri Dunant in 1863. Because the Red Cross emblem is legally protected under the Geneva Conventions, continental European pharmacies adopted a green Greek cross instead. Either way, the + became shorthand for "help is here."

In Unicode, ➕ is U+2795 HEAVY PLUS SIGN, added to the Dingbats block in version 1.1 (June 1993) from Hermann Zapf's 1978 typeface, given emoji presentation in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010), and colored by Emoji 1.0 in 2015. The "heavy" version exists because the standard plus sign (U+002B) is too thin to work as a tap target on a phone screen. Every "add" button you've ever pressed is a descendant of ITC Zapf Dingbats.

➕ has by far the highest search volume of any math emoji, sitting at 49-80 on Google Trends across 2024-2026 while ➖ barely clears 5. The reason is simple: ➕ isn't just a math symbol, it's an aesthetic. It means "add," "more," "positive," and "good" all at once, and people search for it in contexts that have nothing to do with arithmetic.

Pro/con lists. The flagship use. ➕ marks the good stuff, ➖ marks the bad. Emoji Combos has hundreds of templates built around the pair.

Plus one. Wedding invitations, dating profiles, and event RSVPs all use ➕1️⃣ to mean "bringing a partner." Miss Manners hates the generic "plus one" phrasing but accepts it's inescapable at this point.

Medical and pharmacy. On Twitter/X health threads, ➕ stands in for medical context. Not because users know about Geneva Conventions, but because a green or red + is the visual cue for "pharmacy" or "hospital" on any map or sign around the world.

Stat boosts and buffs. In gaming patch notes and RPG streamer discourse, ➕ marks buffs, power-ups, and stat increases. Paired with weapons or armor emojis.

Ed Sheeran fan culture. ➕ is the title of his 2011 debut album. Fans tag posts about the "Plus era" with it. The orange cover with a white + is one of the most visually recognizable album designs of the 2010s.

Dating app bios. "Cat lover ➕ coffee snob ➕ hiker." A way to stack traits without writing commas. Feels more visual on Hinge or Bumble.

Aesthetic dividers. Some Twitter users replace bullets with ➕ to break up threads. It's cleaner than • and still visually heavy.

What ➕ doesn't do is emotional lifting. It's neutral-positive, not warm. Nobody uses ➕ to say "I love you": they use ❤️. Plus is the operator; love is the subject.

The plus sign started as the letter t. Medieval Latin scribes abbreviated the word et ("and") by crossing a t, and over centuries of copyist shorthand the loops of the e fell away and just the crossed stem survived. By the late 1400s the result looked like a modern +.

Johannes Widmann, a mathematician and lecturer at the University of Leipzig, was writing a textbook for merchants in 1489, titled Behende und hüpsche Rechenung auff allen Kauffmanschafft (Nimble and Neat Calculation in all Trades). To explain how to track surplus and deficit in warehouse bookkeeping, he printed two symbols nobody had used in print before: + for surplus, − for deficit. Widmann wasn't making a mathematical claim; he was just trying to make inventory accounting less error-prone. Within fifty years his surplus-marker had become the symbol for addition in European arithmetic, and by the time Robert Recorde published *The Whetstone of Witte* in 1557, + and − were standard.

The religious and medical branch of the + family is separate. The Greek cross (an equal-armed cross, same width as height) is one of the oldest Christian symbols, predating the Latin cross used for crucifixion imagery. In June 1863, Swiss businessman Henri Dunant and four colleagues founded what became the International Committee of the Red Cross. They needed a universally recognizable emblem that wouldn't offend any religion, and they chose a red cross on a white background: literally the Swiss flag inverted, honoring Dunant's Swiss nationality. It wasn't intended as a religious symbol, but the shape is the same Greek cross. The First Geneva Convention made the emblem legally protected in 1864.

Because pharmacies wanted to signal medical help without infringing on the protected Red Cross emblem, French pharmacists began using a green Greek cross in the early 20th century. The color change was enough to sidestep legal issues, and the green + became the standard pharmacy sign across continental Europe. Americans kept red, which is why "drugstore" iconography in the US is still a red cross on white.

Hermann Zapf's 1978 ITC Zapf Dingbats included a heavy plus sign designed for typesetters who needed a bold, readable mark for buttons and bullet lists. Unicode 1.1 imported the Dingbats block in June 1993 and assigned U+2795 HEAVY PLUS SIGN. Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) added emoji presentation, and Emoji 1.0 (2015) brought color rendering.

On 9 September 2011, Ed Sheeran released +) as his major-label debut on Asylum and Atlantic Records. It sold 102,000 copies in its first UK week and debuted at #1, then went on to sell over 13 million units globally. The solid-orange cover with a white + became one of the defining album visuals of the 2010s, and Sheeran built his next 12 years of albums around continuing the math-symbol series: × (2014), ÷ (2017), = (2021), − (2023).

• ➕
  + (Plus) · 2011: The debut. Career starting and building momentum. Solid orange cover, white +. Released 9 September 2011. 102k first-week UK, #1 UK, #5 US. Sold 13M+ units worldwide.
• ✖️
  × (Multiply) · 2014: Second album. Ambition scaling up. Contained 'Thinking Out Loud' and 'Photograph'. Sold 14M+ copies worldwide.
• ➗
  ÷ (Divide) · 2017: Third album. Career vs. life, attention splitting. Contained 'Shape of You' and 'Perfect'. Sold 20M+ copies, most commercially successful of the series.
• 🟰
  = (Equals) · 2021: Fourth album. Stability, settled life, equation balanced. Sixth UK #1 for Sheeran.
• ➖
  − (Subtract) · 2023: Fifth and final. Grief, loss, removal. Written after his friend died and his wife's tumor diagnosis. Produced by Aaron Dessner. Fastest-selling UK album of 2023.

1. 1489Johannes Widmann's *Behende und hüpsche Rechenung* prints + and − for the first time, used to mark surplus and deficit in mercantile accounting.
2. 1557Robert Recorde's *Whetstone of Witte* standardizes + for addition in English algebra, alongside his invention of the equals sign.
3. 1863Henri Dunant founds the International Committee of the Red Cross. The red Greek cross on white becomes a legally protected emblem for medical neutrality.
4. 1901French pharmacies begin using the green Greek cross as a pharmacy symbol, since the red version is reserved for the Red Cross.
5. 1978Hermann Zapf publishes ITC Zapf Dingbats. The heavy plus sign is included as a typesetter's glyph for buttons and lists.
6. 1993Unicode 1.1 imports the Dingbats block. U+2795 HEAVY PLUS SIGN is assigned.
7. 2010Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) adds emoji presentation to ➕, putting it on every smartphone keyboard from the first wave of native emoji support.
8. 2011Ed Sheeran releases + (Plus) on 9 September. Debuts #1 UK, #5 US Billboard 200. Cover becomes one of the most recognizable album designs of the decade.
9. 2015Emoji 1.0 adds color rendering. Platforms settle on blue or green as the default ➕ color.

• •The plus sign started life as the letter t. Medieval scribes abbreviated Latin et ("and") into a crossed t, and over centuries the loops of the e disappeared. The first printed use was in Johannes Widmann's 1489 arithmetic textbook, where it marked warehouse surplus, not addition.
• •The red + on pharmacies and ambulances comes from the International Red Cross, founded by Henri Dunant in 1863. The emblem is the Swiss flag inverted, honoring Dunant's nationality. It's legally protected under the Geneva Conventions.
• •European pharmacies use a green + instead of red because the Red Cross emblem is reserved for military medical neutrality. The green Greek cross became the pharmacy symbol across France, Italy, Spain, and Germany in the early 20th century.
• •Ed Sheeran's + (Plus) album, released 9 September 2011, sold 102,000 copies in its first UK week) and debuted at #1. Over 13 million total units sold worldwide, making it one of the best-selling albums of the 2010s.
• •➕ dominates math emoji search volume at 49-80 on Google Trends, roughly 15-25 times the volume of ➖. The reason: people search "plus emoji" for contexts that have nothing to do with addition (add button, positive, medical, plus one).
• •The Greek cross (equal-armed +) is older than Christianity. It appears in pre-Christian Greek, Roman, and Byzantine art, and was adopted as a Christian symbol later. The Latin cross (longer vertical) is the one specifically tied to crucifixion imagery.
• •Every "add" button in every mobile app, from adding contacts to adding photos to Spotify adding a song, traces back to Hermann Zapf's 1978 ITC Zapf Dingbats, which included the heavy plus glyph designed for typesetters' buttons.
• •In Japanese, the math plus is 足す (tasu), and the symbol + is used identically to English math. But on signage, Japanese pharmacies use the kanji 薬 ("medicine"), not the Western cross, so ➕ reads as math-first in Japanese online contexts.