How to type Black Star
To type Black Star (★), press Alt + 9733 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or write ★ in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+2605 directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 2605 on Linux, or 2605 then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Black Star
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+2605
- Windows
- Alt + 9733 needs regedit
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 9733 | Above 255, so Windows will not accept it as typed. Copy the character instead. |
| Mac | N/A | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | ★ | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+2605 | BLACK STAR |
Other symbols
Black Star is not the only name it goes by: people look for ★ as stars too, and the search box on this site matches that as readily as the Unicode name.
★ lives in the Miscellaneous Symbols block (U+2600-U+26FF), weather, astrology, religion, games and a wide miscellany. Within Unicode it is classified as So, a symbol.
What Black Star is used for
In mathematical notation ★ is an ordinary symbol: it carries no special spacing and sits in an expression the way a letter does, standing for a thing rather than doing something to the things around it. That is the classification unicode-math gives it, and it is what decides how the symbol is set: $\bigstar$ in LaTeX, in maths mode rather than in a sentence.
What ★ gets confused with
★ has lookalikes that are a different character underneath. Search, sorting and anything that compares strings can tell them apart even where a reader cannot.
☆ (U+2606) is the white star, its hollow counterpart. The pair is how a rating out of five is drawn.
✦ (U+2726) is a black four-pointed star, which reads as a sparkle rather than a rating.
✱ (U+2731) is a heavy asterisk, which is a footnote mark.
What Unicode says about Black Star
The code chart points from ★ to star operator (U+22C6), black small star (U+2B51), left half black star (U+2BE8) and light five pointed black star (U+1F7C9). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Black Star looks nearly right but not quite.
How Black Star behaves in software
★ is East Asian Ambiguous: one column in a Western locale and two in a CJK one. That is why a table that lines up on your machine can break on somebody else's, with no change to the text at all. It carries no direction of its own, so in a line that mixes English with Arabic or Hebrew it takes the direction of the text around it rather than forcing one.
What people ask about Black Star
What do snapchat stars mean?
★ is BLACK STAR, encoded at U+2605. It is distinct from star operator (U+22C6) and black small star (U+2B51), which the chart lists beside it precisely because they are confused for one another.
How to type a star?
You can press Alt + 9733 on Windows, with Num Lock on and the digits typed on the numeric keypad. That produces ★.
Every way to write Black Star
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+2605 |
| Decimal | 9733 |
| UTF-8 bytes | E2 98 85 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 26 05 |
| HTML entity | ★ |
| HTML numeric | ★ or ★ |
| CSS | \2605 |
| JavaScript | \u2605 |
| Python | \u2605 |
| URL-encoded | %E2%98%85 |
| LaTeX, in maths mode | $\bigstar$ |
| SVG | 2605.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If ★ arrives as ★
One character has become three, which is what a three-byte UTF-8 sequence looks like when each byte is read separately: E2 98 85 read as Windows-1252 gives exactly ★. The text is intact and the damage is in the reading, so setting the reader to UTF-8 restores it and retyping does not. A rectangle instead of the mojibake means the opposite: the encoding is right and the font has no glyph at U+2605, which for a character this far outside Latin-1 is common in older office fonts.