✺ Sixteen Pointed Asterisk: Meaning, Unicode & How to Type It
The ✺ (Sixteen Pointed Asterisk) is a decorative typographic symbol featuring a central point with sixteen radiating spokes, closely resembling a sunburst or a complex star. Introduced in Unicode 1.1 as part of the Dingbats block, this symbol originally served as a stylish alternative to the standard asterisk for book formatting and graphic design. Today, digital creators frequently use it to add a spark of celestial aesthetic to social media posts and text-based art.
Before modern emojis took over our keyboards, fonts like ITC Zapf Dingbats ruled the world of digital decoration. Legendary typeface designer Hermann Zapf created this collection in the late 1970s, and the sixteen-pointed asterisk was one of its standout ornaments. To ensure these classic design elements survived the leap across different computer systems, the Unicode Consortium added the symbol under the code point U+273A within the Dingbats block.
While you won't find the sixteen-pointed asterisk in complex mathematical equations or standard programming syntax, it thrives in typography and digital culture. Typesetters use it as a striking bullet point, a scene-break indicator, or a fleuron to divide book chapters. On platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Tumblr, users creatively weave ✺ into usernames, bios, and captions to mimic a glowing sun, a fluffy flower, or a burst of magic. It perfectly fits the celestial aesthetic, offering a vintage, text-based alternative to standard yellow star emojis.
Typing the ✺ symbol varies depending on your device. On Windows, you can type 273A in Microsoft Word and press Alt + X, or use the Alt code by holding Alt and typing 10042 on your numeric keypad. Mac users can easily find it by pressing Control + Command + Space to open the Character Viewer and searching for "Sixteen Pointed Asterisk". For web developers, dropping ✺ or ✺ into your HTML will render this sunburst perfectly on any webpage.
The Unicode standard houses an entire galaxy of asterisks and stars, each with distinct visual flavors. The ✺ sits apart from the standard keyboard asterisk (*), which usually has five or six points and is strictly used for footnotes or multiplication. It also differs from the Eight Pointed Heavy Asterisk (✸) and the Twelve Pointed Black Star (✹), both of which are bolder but lack the fine, intricate detailing of the sixteen-pointed variant. Choosing between them simply depends on how much visual impact you want your text to pack.