star symbols
Star symbols and sparkles
Filled, hollow, four-pointed and sparkling, ready to copy in one tap.
42 symbols · tap any one to copy
Stars & sparkles
Used to pad out usernames, mark ratings and reviews, and frame headings — the outline and filled stars pair well as a five-star scale.
The two stars almost everyone actually wants are ★ and ☆, at U+2605 and U+2606. They live in Miscellaneous Symbols, the same early block that holds weather signs and chess pieces, and they were deliberately encoded as a matched pair. In nearly every font they are drawn to the same width and sit on the same baseline, which is the whole reason a rating like ★★★☆☆ lines up neatly instead of wobbling. Build a five-star scale out of two stars from different blocks and it will not.
Most of the fancier stars on this page come from Dingbats, and that block has a specific origin worth knowing. It is essentially the Zapf Dingbats typeface, drawn by Hermann Zapf and released by ITC in 1978, which became famous because Adobe shipped it in every PostScript printer. When Unicode needed a stock of ornaments it took the set more or less wholesale, which is why the block reads like a printer's ornament catalogue rather than a designed system. ✦ ✧ ✩ ✪ ✫ ✬ ✭ ✮ ✯ ✰ are that inheritance.
A few of the characters people copy as stars are technically not stars. ✱ ✲ ✳ ✴ ✵ ✶ are catalogued as asterisks, which is why they tend to sit slightly higher than a five-pointed star and look lighter beside one. ⋆ is stranger still: it is the mathematical star operator from the Mathematical Operators block, positioned on the maths axis so it floats near the middle of the line height rather than resting on the baseline. Fine on its own, visibly misaligned in a row of ★.
Then there is the emoji tier. ⭐ 🌟 ✨ 💫 🌠 🌌 are pictures with fixed colours, and they change size and style depending on whose phone is displaying them. They read as much warmer and more casual than the text stars, and they are the wrong tool for a rating scale because there is no matching hollow version to represent the empty half of the score.
One character here deserves care rather than decoration. ✡ is the Star of David, a religious symbol, and 🔯 is a six pointed star with a dot in the middle. Neither is a generic sparkle, and using them to pad out a username reads badly to anyone who recognises them. Everything else on the page is ornamental and free of that baggage, so there is no shortage of alternatives.
Common questions
How do I make a five-star rating in plain text?
Combine ★ and ☆ from this page, filling from the left: ★★★★☆ is four out of five. Both come from the same block and are usually drawn at the same width, so the row stays even. Avoid mixing in ✦ or ⭐, which have different widths and will make the scale look ragged.
Why does one of my stars sit higher than the others?
You have almost certainly picked up ⋆, the maths star operator, or one of the asterisk-shaped characters. Those are vertically centred for use inside equations rather than aligned to the baseline like ★. Swap it for a star from the same family as the rest of the row and the line evens out.
Which stars work in game names and older devices?
The simple text ones are safest. ★ ☆ ✩ and the basic Dingbats stars have been in system fonts for decades and appear almost everywhere, while the emoji stars need a modern colour font and get rejected outright by many name validators. If a field is fussy, start with ★.
Can I change the colour of a star symbol?
Only for the text ones, and only where you control the styling. Because ★ ☆ ✦ are drawn like letters, they take on whatever colour the surrounding text has, so they turn white in dark mode automatically. Emoji stars carry their own colours and ignore any styling you apply.