Star symbols: copy them by number of points

Every star in the first four sets is text. It takes the font, size and colour of the words around it, so a ★ in a caption on a dark screen turns white with the rest of the line. ⭐ is a separate character that phones draw as a yellow emoji. Its official name is white medium star, because the plain symbol in Unicode’s charts is a hollow outline; the gold colour came later, from the phone makers.

A few can change on their own. ✴ (eight-pointed star), ✳ (eight-spoked asterisk), ✡ and ☪ also have emoji forms, and some apps show those as coloured tiles. For the first two, ✷ and ✱ are close look-alikes that never change, so use them when a row has to stay plain.

• Use ★ for the score and ☆ for what’s missing: ★★★★☆. Fonts draw them as a pair, so the row stays even. No emoji has an empty outline star, so a rating built from ⭐ can’t show the missing ones.
• Unicode does have half stars, such as ⯨ and ⯪, but few fonts include them and many phones show empty boxes instead. Write 4.5/5 next to ★★★★☆ rather than risk it.
• Add the number in digits or words. A screen reader names each star in turn, so ★★★★☆ on its own never comes out as “four out of five.”
• Keep ★★★★★ for real ratings. Readers take a row of five as a score, so as decoration it looks like a review.

Asterisk comes from the Greek for “little star,” and in chats and comments it does more jobs than any other star.

• Corrections. Sending *their straight after a typo means “I meant their.” The asterisk goes before the corrected word.
• Actions and emphasis, as in *waves* or “I’m *so* tired.” Instagram and Facebook show the asterisks exactly as typed, while WhatsApp turns *word* into bold.
• Small print. An asterisk after a claim points to a note further down, as in “free gift wrap*.”
• Breaks. ⁂, three asterisks in a triangle, is called an asterism. It and a spaced row of three asterisks both mark a pause between parts of a long caption.

• ✡ is the Star of David, a symbol of Judaism, and ☪ the star and crescent, widely associated with Islam. Use them where you mean them, not as a repeating pattern.
• ٭ comes from the Arabic block of Unicode, so your phone draws it with its Arabic font, and it can look smaller or bolder than the stars beside it.
• On many maps a star marks a capital city, and hotels are graded with stars, usually up to five. Both habits shape how readers see a ★ next to a place name or a business.
• 🔯 entered emoji from Japanese phones, where a six-pointed star with a dot was used for fortune-telling, and it still turns up next to horoscopes.