Three of these are not pictures

Thirty-one of the thirty-four characters above are general symbols — Unicode general category So, where dingbats sit. Three are not. ⋆ is U+22C6 STAR OPERATOR and ≛ is U+225B STAR EQUALS; both are category Sm, mathematical symbol. ٭ is U+066D ARABIC FIVE POINTED STAR, category Po, punctuation.

The category is not a filing detail. Software that reads it treats U+22C6 as an operator: a maths layout engine sets space on either side of it and can break a line after it, and a regular expression class written \p{Sm} matches it while skipping every dingbat on this page. U+22C6 is the character people reach for when they want a small, neat star, and then it spaces itself like a multiplication sign. The small pictorial stars are U+2B51 BLACK SMALL STAR ⭑, U+2B52 WHITE SMALL STAR ⭒ and U+2726 BLACK FOUR POINTED STAR ✦.

★ and ☆ have no fixed width

Every character carries an East Asian Width property. U+2605 BLACK STAR and U+2606 WHITE STAR are Ambiguous: the width is settled by the surrounding context, one cell in a Western run and two cells when the text is laid out with an East Asian font. U+2B50 WHITE MEDIUM STAR is Wide, which is two cells wherever it lands. The other thirty-one are Neutral and ask for one.

This is what breaks a rating column in a terminal, a code comment or a fixed-width table: the column drawn with U+2605 sits flush in one setting and slips by a cell in another. If the alignment has to survive, U+2B51 and U+2B52 are Neutral and stay put.

The names carry the fill and the point count

• BLACK means filled and WHITE means hollow. The words describe ink, not colour.
• OUTLINED, STRESS OUTLINED, SHADOWED, OPEN CENTRE and CIRCLED each name a treatment of the same outline.
• FOUR, SIX, EIGHT and TWELVE POINTED give the count, and RECTILINEAR means the points are straight-sided.

So if a specific star is wanted, read the name rather than judging the glyph, which changes shape from font to font.

Four half-filled stars, in two different senses

⯨ U+2BE8 LEFT HALF BLACK STAR and ⯩ U+2BE9 RIGHT HALF BLACK STAR are half of a star. ⯪ U+2BEA STAR WITH LEFT HALF BLACK and ⯫ U+2BEB STAR WITH RIGHT HALF BLACK are a whole star with one half filled. For a half-mark in a rating the second pair keeps the outline complete; the first pair is a fragment and leaves the space beside it empty.

Where a star stops working

A field that accepts only ASCII drops all thirty-four, and the keyboard asterisk is the fallback that always survives. A font with no glyph for the codepoint shows the missing-glyph box instead, which is a font problem rather than a broken copy: the character sitting in the field is still the right one, and it will render elsewhere. If what you want is a badge or an organisation's emblem, there is nothing here to copy — every row is an encoded character, and an emblem is artwork.

The rest of the sets are indexed on the symbol reference. The crescent that pairs with U+262A sits with the rest of the sky on sun, moon and planet symbols, and every star here reappears among the decorative characters on aesthetic symbols.