How to type White Star
To type White Star (☆), press Alt + 9734 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+2606 directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 2606 on Linux, or 2606 then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
White Star
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+2606
- Windows
- Alt + 9734 needs regedit
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 9734 | 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+2606 | WHITE STAR |
Other symbols
☆ 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.
How to type ☆ on a phone
On a phone, neither iOS nor Android has a codepoint route. Copy ☆ from this page once, then add it as a text replacement (Settings, General, Keyboard on iOS) so a short abbreviation expands to it from then on.
What White 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: $\bigwhitestar$ in LaTeX, in maths mode rather than in a sentence.
What Unicode says about White Star
The code chart points from ☆ to stress outlined white star (U+2729), white medium star (U+2B50) and glowing star (U+1F31F). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when White Star looks nearly right but not quite.
How White 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 White Star
What does the white star on snapchat mean?
☆ is WHITE STAR, encoded at U+2606. It is distinct from stress outlined white star (U+2729) and white medium star (U+2B50), which the chart lists beside it precisely because they are confused for one another.
Every way to write White Star
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+2606 |
| Decimal | 9734 |
| UTF-8 bytes | E2 98 86 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 26 06 |
| HTML entity | ☆ |
| HTML numeric | ☆ or ☆ |
| CSS | \2606 |
| JavaScript | \u2606 |
| Python | \u2606 |
| URL-encoded | %E2%98%86 |
| LaTeX, in maths mode | $\bigwhitestar$ |
| SVG | 2606.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 86 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+2606, which for a character this far outside Latin-1 is common in older office fonts.