Arabic star

For astronomical stars with Arabic names, see List of Arabic star names.

The Arabic star is a punctuation mark added to Unicode 1.1^[1] because the asterisk (*) might appear similar to a Star of David in its six-lobed form (^✻).^[2][3]

٭
Arabic star
U+066D ٭ ARABIC FIVE POINTED STAR

The Arabic star is given a distinct character in Unicode, U+066D ٭ ARABIC FIVE POINTED STAR (the note ‘appearance rather variable’ was added in Unicode 5.1^[4]), in the range Arabic punctuation.^[5]

Variants

In many modern fonts, however, the asterisk is five-pointed, and the Arabic star is sometimes six- or eight-pointed. The two symbols are compared below (the display depends on your browser's font).

Asterisk	Full-width Asterisk	Arabic star	five-pointed star	six-pointed star	eight-pointed star
*	＊	٭	★	✶	✴

Unicode

In Unicode, Arabic and similar stars are encoded at:

• U+066D ٭ ARABIC FIVE POINTED STAR
• U+06DE ۞ ARABIC START OF RUB EL HIZB

In some displays, the use of the ٭ character can cause the text directionality to change.^[6]

See also

• Star (glyph)