Star Symbol (★ ☆ ✦): Copy and Paste
Tap any star to copy it. And if you use them for ratings, one section explains why “★★★☆☆” on its own tells a screen reader nothing at all.
Tap a star to copy it
The first two rows are text symbols and inherit the colour of your letters. The last row are emoji and bring their own colour.
Stars
The classics from the Miscellaneous Symbols block. ★ and ☆ are the pair used for ratings.
Sparkles and ornaments
For decorating headings and separating blocks of text.
Star emoji
Every platform draws these its own way.
What is the star symbol?
The star symbol (★) lives at code point U+2605, and its hollow twin ☆ sits in the very next slot, U+2606. Both belong to Unicode's Miscellaneous Symbols block.
The fact that they sit in consecutive positions is not a coincidence. Unicode pairs a great many symbols in filled and hollow versions precisely for uses like ratings, where you need to distinguish what has been earned from what has not. It is the same pattern the heart follows (♥ and ♡), and the square, and the circle.
The text star is not an emoji, and that distinction causes more confusion than any other. ★ behaves like a letter: if the paragraph is red, the star comes out red; if the paragraph is bold, the star gets heavier; if you increase the font size, it grows with everything else. The ⭐ on your phone keyboard is a different thing entirely — a picture with its own colour baked in, which additionally changes appearance depending on the operating system rendering it.
That single difference decides which one you should reach for. Anything that will be printed, converted to PDF, pasted into a spreadsheet or rendered in a monochrome interface wants the text star. Anything that will be read on a phone, in a chat app or on a social feed is usually better served by the emoji, because it does not depend on the reader having a font that contains the glyph.
Rating stars: the mistake nearly everyone makes
By far the most common use of these symbols is scoring something. You write a string like this one and call it done:
★★★★☆
It works visually, but it has a serious problem: to anyone who is not looking at the screen, that line means nothing. A screen reader might announce it as “black star, black star, black star, black star, white star”, it might read out a different set of names depending on the voice pack, or it might skip the whole run as decorative. None of those three outcomes communicates “4 out of 5”.
The fix is not to stop using stars. It is to stop making them carry the data. The number has to be present as text, even when it is hidden visually:
Symbols only
<span>★★★★☆</span> With the score in text
<span aria-label="4 out of 5 stars">
<span aria-hidden="true">★★★★☆</span>
</span>
The aria-hidden on the inner span matters just as much as the label. Without it, the reader announces “4 out of 5 stars” and then recites all five characters one by one, which is worse than either option on its own. With it, the stars are treated as what they are — decoration — and the text carries the meaning.
A second detail worth getting right: if the rating is interactive, a row of star characters is not a control. Radio buttons or a slider, labelled properly and reachable by keyboard, are what a rating widget should be built on; the stars are then just the visual skin painted over them with CSS.
In plain text — an email, a review, a message — the rule is the same but simpler: write the number. “★★★★☆ (4/5)” is understood by everyone, and it also survives the recipient not having the right font and seeing empty boxes instead of stars.
How much each star costs
There is a widespread belief that every emoji counts double. Stars are a neat demonstration that it is not true, and the reason comes down to where each character lives inside Unicode:
| Star | Code point | UTF-16 units | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| ★ | U+2605 | 1 | Text star |
| ⭐ | U+2B50 | 1 | Star emoji |
| ✨ | U+2728 | 1 | Sparkles |
| 💫 | U+1F4AB | 2 | Dizzy |
The ⭐ takes a single unit despite being an emoji, because its code point (U+2B50) sits inside the Basic Multilingual Plane, the first stretch of Unicode. By contrast 💫 and 🌠 live above that plane and need two units each. X (Twitter), web forms and JavaScript all count in those units, so the difference shows up exactly when you are running out of room.
In an SMS the story changes completely. None of these stars is in the GSM alphabet, so a single one is enough to push the whole message into UCS-2 encoding and drop the limit from 160 characters to 70. You can verify that in our SMS character counter, and get the ordinary total in the character counter.
How to type a star on each system
The shortcuts give you the text star ★. The coloured ones live in the emoji panel.
Windows
Alt + 9733 gives ★; Alt + 9734 gives ☆.
Those are the decimal values of their Unicode code points.
macOS
Opens the character viewer; search for “star”.
macOS ships no key combination for ★; the viewer or this page is the way.
Linux
Type the hexadecimal code point, then press space.
2606 for the hollow one, 2726 for the four-pointed star.
Android & iOS
That is where ⭐ 🌟 ✨ live, the coloured ones.
The text ★ is not there — copy it from this page.
HTML & CSS
Also ★. The hollow one is ☆.
In CSS: content: "\2605". Neither has a named entity.
Word & Docs
Type the hexadecimal code, then press Alt + X.
Or Insert → Symbol, “Miscellaneous Symbols” subset.
Windows’ Alt + 9733 is not an arbitrary number: 9733 is the decimal value of U+2605. Alt codes of four digits or more are always the Unicode code point written in decimal, so if you know one you can derive the other — and the same trick gives you 9734 for the hollow star without looking anything up.
Which variant to use when
- ★ ☆ for ratings and tables. Because they inherit the colour and size of the text, they fit into any design and print cleanly. They are the only reasonable choice in a formal document.
- ✦ ✧ for decoration. The four-pointed stars carry less visual weight and work as a separator or a flourish in a heading without stealing attention from the words.
- ⁂ for section breaks. The asterism is a classic typographic mark for signalling a jump inside a long text — quieter than a horizontal rule, and it has been used in books for centuries.
- ⭐ ✨ for messages and social posts. They look equally striking on any phone and do not depend on the reader’s font containing the glyph.
A word of warning about fonts: the less common text symbols (✵, ✽, ⁂) are not present in every typeface. If the reader’s system lacks the glyph, they see an empty rectangle — the so-called tofu box. The rarer the symbol, the more sense it makes to reserve it for places where you control the typography, and to fall back on ★ and ☆ whenever the text is going to travel.
One last practical note on searching and sorting. A star pasted into a filename, a spreadsheet cell or a document title is a real character, so it participates in sorting and in find-and-replace. Sorting a column that starts with ★ will not place those rows where you expect, because the symbol sorts far away from the letters. If you are using stars to flag priority rows, a separate column with a number will serve you far better.
Frequently asked questions
How do I type a star symbol on my keyboard?
What is the difference between ★ and ⭐?
What is the Unicode code for the star symbol?
How do I make rating stars?
Is there a half star character for ratings?
Does the star emoji count as two characters?
Can I put stars in my profile name?
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