symbol explained
Black Star
The solid five-point star used in rating displays everywhere.
- Unicode
- U+2605
Try Black Star
Edit the text, then change the font and size.
The short answer
What does Black Star mean?
The solid five-point star used in rating displays everywhere. Reviews, scores and favourites — pair with ☆ for empty stars.
Background
Where it comes from
The filled star is Unicode U+2605, BLACK STAR, and its outline partner ☆ is U+2606. Interfaces rated things with this pair long before icon fonts and SVG sprites were practical.
In conversation
How to use it
Reviews, scores and favourites — pair with ☆ for empty stars. Copy the character itself when you need plain text that can be searched, selected and pasted like a letter.
Realistic examples
Black Star in a sentence
“★★★★☆ 4.2 average”
“Staff pick ★”
“★ Sold out ★”
Tone & nuance
What it communicates
Evaluative rather than emotional. Next to a number it reads as a score; alone in a heading or bio it is simply decoration.
Easily confused
Characters that look like ★
These are separate characters. However similar they render, they sort, search and compare differently — which is why pasting the wrong one is so easy to miss.
White star
U+2606
The outline counterpart, and the correct partner for an empty position in a rating row.
Star emoji
U+2B50
Renders as a yellow emoji. Fine in a caption, wrong in a monochrome rating widget.
Black four pointed star
U+2726
Four points rather than five, which reads as decoration rather than as a score.
For developers
★ in code
Each value is generated from the character itself, so it stays correct even where a file encoding cannot hold the symbol directly.
| Format | Value | When to use it | Copy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode | U+2605 | The standard reference. Use it to search a character map or a spec. | |
| HTML (hex) | ★ | For HTML and XML. Safe in files that are not saved as UTF-8. | |
| HTML (decimal) | ★ | The same reference in decimal. Both render identically. | |
| CSS | \2605 | For the content property. Keep the quotes around the whole value. | |
| JavaScript | \u{2605} | A string-literal escape. Needs the u flag inside a regular expression. | |
| URL-encoded | %E2%98%85 | Percent-encoded UTF-8, for query strings and API requests. |
Common questions
Black Star FAQ
What does the black star ★ mean?
The solid five-point star used in rating displays everywhere. Reviews, scores and favourites — pair with ☆ for empty stars.
How do I type ★?
The fastest way is the copy button on this page, which puts ★ on the clipboard on its own, without a label or a stray space. To insert it by hand, use the code point U+2605. Windows Character Map and the macOS Emoji & Symbols viewer both let you search for it by name.
Will ★ look the same everywhere?
★ is plain text, not an image, so it takes on the font, size and colour of the words around it while keeping the code point U+2605 wherever it is pasted. A font with limited coverage can substitute a different glyph or show an empty box, and some apps restyle certain symbols as coloured emoji, so preview it in the app and theme your readers will actually use.
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