Arabic star
| ٭ | |
|---|---|
Arabic star | |
| U+066D ٭ ARABIC FIVE POINTED STAR |
The Arabic star is a punctuation mark added to Unicode 1.1 because the asterisk (*) might appear similar to a Star of David in its six-lobed form (✻).
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), in the range Arabic punctuation.
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.