Star symbols ★ ☆ ✧ — sparkle dividers & shapes

Stars are the most reused decorative characters there are: a rating, a divider between two lines of a bio, or a small glint beside a name. All of them here are plain text, so they take the colour of the words around them and paste anywhere without an app or a font install.

The set is bigger than most people realise — ★ and ☆ are only two of it, and ✦ ✧ are not stars at all but four-pointed sparkles. Which one you pick decides where it survives: the text stars pass a TikTok display name and usually a Roblox or Free Fire name, while the ⭐ emoji is stripped from most game name fields. Below is every one with its Unicode name, code point and Windows alt code, then the sparkle dividers, ready-made ★★★☆☆ ratings, and the squares, circles and triangles that live in the same part of Unicode.

How to use star symbols

• Ratings: ★★★★☆ works in a spreadsheet, an export or a review title.
• Bio: a divider such as ⊹₊˚ or ────୨ৎ──── breaks the text into rows.
• Display name: ⋆ and ✧ sit small and usually pass a name filter.
• Lists: ▪ ◦ ◇ make bullets that survive plain text.

If the star must stay yellow everywhere, use ⭐. If it must match your text, use ★ or ☆.

Every star with its code point and alt code

Every star below is plain text, so it takes the colour of the words around it and pastes into a bio, a document or a display name without an app. Tap a symbol to copy it. The alt code is the number to hold Alt and type on a numeric keypad; in Word you can instead type the code point without the U+ and press Alt+X.

Two of these get confused constantly. ✦ and ✧ are four-pointed sparkles, not stars — which is why they read as a glint rather than a rating. ⋆ is a maths operator, and it is the star that ends up in most aesthetic combos because it sits small and high on the line.

Sparkle dividers and combos

A divider is a short run of marks that breaks a bio into readable rows without spending a line on words. These are the ones that fit on a single row in most bio fields. Tap to copy the whole divider.

Keep them short. A divider that wraps stops reading as a divider, and bio fields count every character against the limit. For the bow and heart versions of the same idea, see coquette symbols and heart symbols; for the floral ones, flower symbols.

Star ratings ★★★☆☆

A star rating is just solid stars followed by hollow ones — there is no half-star character in wide use, so ratings are built from ★ and ☆. Tap any row to copy it whole.

Because these are text they keep working in a spreadsheet cell, a plain-text export or a review title, where an image star would not. If you need a half step, ★★★½ reads clearly enough using the fraction character ½ (U+00BD).

Star ★ vs the sparkle emoji ✨

The same distinction that decides everything else on this site.

• ★ ☆ ✧ are text. They take your text colour, and they usually survive a username filter.
• ⭐ and ✨ are emoji. ⭐ is WHITE MEDIUM STAR (U+2B50) and ✨ is SPARKLES (U+2728). Both are fixed-colour pictures, and most game name fields strip them.

The trap is that ⭐ and ★ look almost identical in many interfaces while behaving completely differently. If a star vanished from a display name, it was the emoji. If a star came out yellow when you wanted it to match your text, it was also the emoji — the same rule as the green ✅ and the black ✔.

Squares, circles and triangles □ ○ △ ◇

The same corner of Unicode that holds the stars also holds the basic shapes, and they behave identically: plain text, your colour, no app. These are what people mean by “square symbols” — not an emoji, just a character.

□ is worth knowing for a second reason: an empty rectangle on your screen is usually not this character. It is the device telling you it has no font for whatever was there — the difference is explained here.

Symbol meanings