About White Star
White Star is the Unicode character ☆ at codepoint U+2606 in the Miscellaneous Symbols block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Reference
The hollow star. In Unicode's naming convention "white" means outlined rather than coloured, so this is the empty counterpart to the filled black star. U+2606 is So in Miscellaneous Symbols, present since Unicode 1.1 (1993), and it holds the HTML named entity ☆ — the plain, obvious name, attached to the unfilled character. The filled one answers to ★ and ★. It carries no emoji property, so it renders in text colour at text size, unlike the star emoji its chart cross-references. East Asian Width is Ambiguous, which is what makes a tidy row of rating stars come out ragged in a terminal or a table.
Typical uses
- The unfilled positions in a rating scale, against the solid star
- An open bullet or a light ornament in running text
- Anywhere a star has to obey the surrounding typography rather than announce itself
At a glance
- U+2606, Miscellaneous Symbols; Unicode 1.1 (1993); general category So
- HTML named entity ☆ — the filled star is ★ and ★
- No emoji property; renders in text colour at text size
- East Asian Width Ambiguous; line break class AI
- Cross-referenced to the stress outlined white star, the star emoji and the glowing star
Historical Notes
Origins
The hollow star is a printer's shape rather than an invention with a date, and this page does not give it one.
Unicode
Present since Unicode 1.1, released in 1993, in Miscellaneous Symbols. The chart entry carries no alias and three cross-references: to the stress outlined white star at U+2729, to the white medium star at U+2B50 — the character now rendered as the gold star emoji — and to the glowing star.
A naming rule that outlived its context
Unicode's black and white convention was written for typography, where filled and unfilled is the only distinction that matters and colour is the reader's choice. It collides with emoji, which are pictures with colours of their own: the character named WHITE MEDIUM STAR is drawn as a solid gold blob on every major platform. Neither of those is a defect. They are two naming systems meeting, and the older one was not written to survive the newer one. The consequence for anyone reading a chart is simply that a character's name describes its outline and never its colour.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use White Star
To use the White Star symbol (☆) in HTML, insert the
entity ☆ directly into your markup. The decimal entity ☆ works in any HTML-serialised document.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\2606';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u2606' evaluates to ☆. In Python source, write '\u2606'.
The character encodes to E2 98 86 as UTF-8 bytes and 2606 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 9734.
This is a text-based Unicode character. It will render in the current font on most platforms. If a font lacks this glyph, the browser may show a placeholder or fall back to a system font.
Things to know
- The named entity ☆ is this character, not the filled one. The filled star is ★ or ★.
- No emoji property, so it inherits text colour, size and line height.
- East Asian Width Ambiguous: full-width in a CJK font context, half-width elsewhere. Pairing it with the filled star in a rating row is safe because both are Ambiguous; pairing either with an emoji star is not, because the emoji is Wide.
- Line break class AI.
- Numeric references are ☆ and ☆.
- In Japanese, 白星 — literally "white star" — means a win. The hollow star is not universally the absence of something, and a rating scale built on that assumption is a cultural choice rather than a neutral one.
In the Wild
On 5 August 2026 not one occurrence was a use. One is a row in Wikipedia's table of characters used for star ratings, in the article on star classification, sitting directly beneath the filled star. The other two are code-chart cells on the Miscellaneous Symbols article.
No rating display on those pages was written in characters. Where ratings appeared they were drawn rather than typed, which is exactly the result the filled star produces.
Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
Does "white" mean the colour white?
No. It means hollow. The outline takes the colour of the surrounding text, so on a dark background it is usually light.
Which HTML entity is this?
☆. The filled star is ★ or ★ — the naming is the opposite of what most people guess.
Is it an emoji?
No. It carries no emoji property. The gold star people tap in messaging is star at U+2B50, a separate character.
Why does a row of stars misalign?
East Asian Width Ambiguous. The advance width is decided by the font context rather than by the character.