What 🟉 means
A thin five-pointed star used as a marker or decoration. The name needs decoding. In Unicode's naming habit, "black" means the shape is filled in (the outline version is "white", as in ), and "light" describes the stroke weight, not brightness or colour: this star has narrower points than the familiar . Nothing in the name is about the night sky or about mood.
So the character carries no message of its own beyond "star". In a document it works as a bullet, a heading ornament, a rating symbol (🟉🟉🟉) or a separator between sections. In a message it reads like any star: a favourite, a highlight, a little sparkle of approval. Someone who sends it instead of most likely just liked the slimmer look, or picked it from a symbol list without noticing the difference. The visible difference between 🟉, and is how fat the points are.
Where does this star come from?
From the Wingdings symbol fonts, whose shapes Unicode encoded in 2014. Wingdings started as a set of symbol fonts called Lucida Icons, Arrows and Stars, designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes in 1990 and 1991 and released by Microsoft under the Wingdings name in 1992; this star comes from its companion font, Wingdings 2. For two decades these stars, bullets and arrows had no standard codes: they lived as font tricks, so switching to a normal font could turn the star into a plain letter. Unicode 7.0 gave hundreds of Wingdings and Webdings shapes proper code points so they could travel as real text, and this star is one of them.
It sits in the Geometric Shapes Extended block, which holds a whole family of stars with different numbers of points, several in more than one weight. For five points the medium weight is the classic , which Unicode already had, so the block added only the light 🟉 and the heavy beside it. Because the character was never made into an emoji, it is normally drawn by whatever text font is in use: it usually takes the colour of the surrounding text, doesn't become a yellow cartoon star, and shows as a box when no font has it.
Neutral and decorative; it signals whatever a star in that spot signals: a highlight, a rating, a flourish.
Where no installed font has it, it arrives as an empty box, so the person you send it to may see nothing at all.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
5
Combination ideas
3Worth knowing
- The same block also holds a nine-pointed white star, encoded because the Bahá'í faith uses it as a symbol; unlike most of its neighbours, it did not come from Wingdings or Webdings.
Questions people ask
3Why does 🟉 show as a box or blank?
Because no font on that device has a drawing for it. The character arrived safely; only the picture is missing.
Is 🟉 an emoji?
No. It is a text symbol with no emoji version, so it doesn't turn into a coloured emoji star. For the emoji star, use .
Should I use 🟉 or ?
unless you specifically want thinner points and control the font, for example in a document or on your own website. In messages, is the safer choice because it is in far more fonts.
More like this
14
How to type or find 🟉
- Also called
- thin black star · light black star · slim five-point star
- Search it as
- five pointed star · thin star · black star · light star · star symbol · text star · Unicode star · Wingdings star
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
🟉\1F7C9Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.