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Star symbols and sparkles
Unicode has more stars than anyone expects — a plain filled-and-hollow pair for ratings, four- and six- and eight-pointed variants for decoration, and a long run of spoked asterisks and sparkles in the Dingbats block. All of them are text, so they take your colour and stay crisp at any size. Copy any character below; each is listed with its Unicode name and code point.
Rating stars
The pair everything else is built on. ★ against ☆ is a five-star rating in ten characters of plain text.
Four-pointed stars
Sparkle-shaped rather than star-shaped. The usual choice for "new", "magic" or AI-generated markers.
Many-pointed stars and bursts
Six, eight, twelve and sixteen points. Heavier and more decorative — good for dividers and flourishes.
Spoked asterisks and snowflakes
Dingbats-block flourishes. ❄ and ❇ have emoji forms — add U+FE0E to keep them monochrome.
Click any character to copy it. Nothing is downloaded — these are text characters, not images.
Unicode blocks
- U+2605–U+2606 Miscellaneous Symbols
- U+2721–U+274A Dingbats
How to use Star Symbols
Build a rating from the filled/hollow pair
Repeat ★ for the score and ☆ for the remainder. Five stars is ten characters of plain text that renders identically in an email, a terminal, a spreadsheet cell and a web page.
Force text presentation on the emoji-capable ones
✴ ✳ ❄ ❇ all have emoji forms. Append the variation selector U+FE0E to keep them monochrome and colourable; without it they arrive pre-coloured and ignore your CSS.
Use four-pointed stars for sparkle, five for rating
✦ and ✧ read as a glint or highlight; ★ reads as a score. Swapping them is the most common misuse — a four-pointed star in a rating row looks like decoration rather than a value.
Label the rating for screen readers
A screen reader announces ★★★☆☆ as five separate star names. Wrap the row in aria-hidden and put the real value in adjacent text, such as "3 out of 5".
About Star Symbols
The plain star pair at U+2605 and U+2606 is one of the most heavily used character combinations on the web, because a rating built from them is genuinely portable. It needs no images, no icon font and no JavaScript, it survives being copied into a plain-text email or a spreadsheet, and it inherits whatever colour the surrounding text has. A five-star rating is ten characters — smaller than the URL of the image that would otherwise draw it.
Beyond that pair, most of Unicode's stars live in the Dingbats block, which was inherited wholesale from the Zapf Dingbats typeface designed by Hermann Zapf in 1978. That is why the naming is so specific and so strange: "heavy teardrop-spoked asterisk" and "eight teardrop-spoked propeller asterisk" are describing actual glyphs from a print typeface, not categories anyone would invent today. It also means the shapes are genuinely well drawn — they were made by a master typographer for professional typesetting.
Point count carries meaning that is worth respecting. Five points reads as a rating or an award. Four points reads as a sparkle, a glint or, increasingly, as the marker for something AI-generated. Six points reads as a snowflake or a compass rose. Eight and above read as bursts and flourishes. Choosing the wrong count is not a rendering error but it does quietly change what a reader thinks you meant.
Four characters in this set — ✴ ✳ ❄ ❇ — were later given emoji presentations, which is a recurring trap across all of Unicode's older symbol blocks. On many platforms they arrive as fixed-colour emoji that ignore CSS entirely, breaking a monochrome design. The text variation selector U+FE0E, placed immediately after the character, restores the text glyph. This site applies that selector to every dual-presentation character it renders, which is why its stars glow in the page accent rather than arriving pre-coloured.
Games drawn with these characters
Every board on this site is built from Unicode, not sprites. These ones use the characters above.
Frequently asked questions
How do I make a star rating with text?
Repeat ★ for the earned stars and ☆ for the rest — ★★★☆☆ is three out of five. It needs no images or JavaScript, copies cleanly into plain text, and takes your CSS colour. For accessibility, hide the row with aria-hidden and state the value in words nearby.
What is the difference between ★ and ✦?
Point count, and with it meaning. ★ has five points and reads as a rating or award; ✦ has four and reads as a sparkle, glint or highlight. Using a four-pointed star in a rating row makes it look decorative rather than like a score.
Why is my star showing as a coloured emoji?
A handful of stars — ✴ ✳ ❄ ❇ — have emoji presentations that some platforms use by default. Append the text variation selector U+FE0E right after the character to force the monochrome glyph. The plain ★ and ☆ have no emoji form and are always safe.
Can I change the colour of a star symbol?
Yes, as long as you have the text presentation rather than the emoji one. Stars are ordinary characters, so CSS `color` applies and they scale like type — a gold ★ is a colour value, not an image asset.
Where do all the unusual star names come from?
The Dingbats block was adopted from Hermann Zapf's 1978 Zapf Dingbats typeface, so the Unicode names describe the original printed glyphs. That is why you get entries such as "heavy teardrop-spoked asterisk" — the names are inherited from print typesetting rather than designed as categories.
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