Star Symbols

The star families

Unicode has dozens of stars, and they come from different places. Knowing the family tells you how safe a given star is.

★ and ☆ are the plain solid and outline stars (U+2605 BLACK STAR, U+2606 WHITE STAR), from the Miscellaneous Symbols block. They are in nearly every font and are what ratings, bullet lists and “favourite” marks have used for decades. If you want one star that will almost certainly show up, choose one of these.

✦ ✧ ✩ ✪ ✫ ✬ ✭ ✮ ✯ ✰ belong to the Dingbats block. Despite the dingbat label, they are ordinary characters you can paste anywhere. ✦ and ✧ are four-pointed “twinkle” stars, a favourite in aesthetic bios because they look like a glint. ✩ is an outlined five-pointed star, ✪ has a circle in the middle, and ✯ is a pinwheel with a shadow. The more elaborate shapes are drawn by fewer fonts, so they are the first to turn into boxes on old devices.

✶ ✷ ✸ ✹ ✺ are six- to twelve-pointed stars, in the same block. They read as bursts or snowflakes more than stars, and work well as spacers between words.

⭑ ⭒ are small stars from the Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows block. They are sized to sit on the text line, which makes them tidy between words. Support is thinner than for ★, so test them if you will rely on them. ⋆ (STAR OPERATOR, U+22C6) is a small mathematical star that is widely available and visually quiet.

Asterisks and sparkles. The ASCII asterisk * is on every keyboard. ⁎ is a low asterisk, and ✱ ✲ ✳ ✴ are heavier asterisk-style stars. ❇ is a sparkle ornament. Several of these (✳ ✴ ❇) are on the emoji list, so phones may draw them in colour.

Colour emoji stars. ⭐ 🌟 and ✨ are emoji by design. ✨ is named SPARKLES and is a cluster of small four-pointed stars, not a single star, but it is what most people mean when they ask for “sparkle” text.

Text stars and emoji stars

Most stars on this page are text characters: they follow your font, your text size and your text colour. You can recolour ★ with CSS and it stays a glyph. Emoji stars are pictures: the system draws them in its own artwork, and their colour is fixed.

The line between them is not always where you would guess. U+2B50 is called WHITE MEDIUM STAR, yet every major platform draws it as a yellow emoji because it is defined as emoji-presentation by default. In the other direction, U+2733 EIGHT SPOKED ASTERISK (✳) and U+2734 EIGHT POINTED BLACK STAR (✴) are text by default but have emoji versions, and some phones show them as coloured tiles.

Characters with both forms accept an invisible variation selector after them: U+FE0E for text and U+FE0F for emoji. For instance, ✳ followed by U+FE0F asks for the emoji tile. Apps are free to ignore the request, so it improves your odds without guaranteeing anything. The selector is also a separate code point, which counts toward some length limits; see the character limits guide.

Where stars work

Stars are widely accepted, but acceptance is a platform decision, not a Unicode one.

• Social bios and names. Common stars like ★ ☆ ✦ appear in a great many bios. Whether a particular field accepts them can change, so check the saved result. Our Instagram fonts page lists the limits we have documented for that platform.
• Games. Display-name filters differ from game to game and can reject symbols outright. Treat any claim that “star X works in game Y” with suspicion unless you can test it, including claims from us. The in-game name box is the only reliable test.
• Ratings. A row of ★ and ☆ can show a rating visually, but it is poor for assistive technology (see below). If you publish ratings on a site, give the value in words too. And only show ratings that are real.
• Documents and websites. ★ is in standard Windows, macOS and mobile fonts. In HTML you can paste it directly with UTF-8 or write ★. For stars that must match your brand colour, a text star plus CSS is lighter than an image.
• Plain-text and code. Many terminals and monospaced fonts draw dingbat stars wider than a normal character, which breaks alignment in tables. Stick to * for anything that must line up.

How to type a star

1. Word on Windows: type the hex code, for example 2605, then press Alt and X. It converts to ★. This works for every star in the grid using the code point beside it.
2. Windows Alt codes: the classic Alt+number codes come from an old DOS character set that has no star, so there is nothing reliable to type. Be wary of lists that claim otherwise.
3. Windows emoji panel: press the Windows key and the period key, then use the Symbols tab or search for “star”.
4. Mac: press Control, Command and Space for the Character Viewer, and search “star”. Double-click a result to insert it.
5. iPhone and Android: the emoji keyboard finds ⭐ and 🌟 by searching “star”. Some keyboards have ★ and ☆ on their symbols page, which varies by keyboard app.
6. Text replacement: set up a shortcut such as “stx” that expands to ✦ on iOS or macOS.

Accessibility

Screen readers read symbols by name. ★ is commonly spoken as “black star” and ☆ as “white star”, while ⭐ is usually “star” or “white medium star”. Names such as “four pointed black star” for ✦ are descriptive but tell the listener nothing about meaning.

That has two consequences. First, a star line used as a decoration, like ✦ ✦ ✦, is announced once per star, so keep runs short. Second, never encode information only in stars. “★★★★☆” is read as a list of black and white stars with no total. Write “4 out of 5 stars” alongside it. Our fancy text accessibility guide covers the wider picture.

Mixing stars with other symbols

Stars look best used sparingly: one at each end of a name, or as a divider between two parts of a bio. The text decorator can wrap a name in star patterns automatically, and the stylish name generator combines letter styles with decorations. For other symbol sets, see heart symbols and arrow symbols, or return to the symbols hub.