Eight-spoked Asterisk Emoji

The eight-spoked asterisk (✳️) is a fancy asterisk with eight thin radial spokes instead of five or six. It reads as a decorative bullet, a typographic flourish, or a 'sparkle that isn't quite a star.' Think of it as the formal cousin of **, the one you bring out when a plain asterisk looks too plain.

It lives in the Unicode Dingbats block next to ✴️, ❇️, and ✨, all inherited from Hermann Zapf's 1978 symbol font. When Unicode 1.1 shipped in June 1993, Zapf's eight-spoked asterisk became U+2733. It got emoji presentation in 2015. On most platforms it's rendered in green, which visually separates it from ✴️ (orange) and ✨ (yellow).

Because the shape is radial rather than pointed, ✳️ doesn't read as a star the way ⭐ or 🌟 does. It reads as a mark: a list bullet, a separator, a small decoration. People use it when writing bullet lists in platforms that don't support rich formatting, when decorating captions, or when they want a visibly 'fancy' asterisk without committing to a full sparkle effect.

On Instagram bios, Twitter/X profiles, and TikTok captions, ✳️ works as an ornamental bullet point. Small businesses use it to list services: ✳️ haircuts ✳️ color ✳️ styling✳️ haircuts ✳️ color ✳️ styling. Aesthetic accounts use it as a neat separator between tags. Because it's green on most keyboards, it also gets used for plant, matcha, forest, and earth-tone posts.

When people can't use rich text formatting (older Instagram, plain text email, Slack without Markdown), ✳️ becomes a bullet substitute. It reads as more intentional than -- or ** and more modern than ••. For list-heavy copy, it adds visual rhythm without adding words.

Whitchy and spiritual corners of the internet sometimes use ✳️ to represent a 'spark' or 'seed intention,' though ✨ and ✴️ do most of that work. The eight spokes occasionally get read as the Noble Eightfold Path in Buddhist content, though the spoke shape is closer to a wheel than a traditional Dharmachakra.

✳️ is part of a 2,000-year typographic lineage. The asterisk itself was invented around 200 BCE at the Library of Alexandria by Aristarchus of Samothrace, a scholar of Homer. He used a small star-shape (asteriskos, 'little star' in Greek) to mark lines in Homeric texts that appeared duplicated elsewhere. Origen later used it to flag missing Hebrew lines in his Hexapla.

Medieval scribes kept using asterisks for emphasis and marginal notes. Early printers (Estienne's 1532 Latin Bible, among others) cut the asterisk into metal type as a five- or six-pointed star, a form that has endured in serif fonts ever since.

The specific eight-spoked version on your keyboard comes from ITC Zapf Dingbats, designed by Hermann Zapf in 1978 from 1,200 sketches narrowed down to 360 symbols. Apple built Zapf Dingbats into the LaserWriter Plus in 1985, seeding it into early desktop publishing. When Unicode 1.1 shipped in June 1993, the entire Dingbats block was absorbed wholesale. U+2733 EIGHT SPOKED ASTERISK was among them. It got full emoji presentation in 2015 as part of Emoji 1.0.

1. -200Aristarchus of Samothrace invents the asteriskos at the Library of Alexandria to mark Homeric passages
2. 1532Robert Estienne's Latin Bible uses printed asterisks, cementing the five/six-pointed form
3. 1978Hermann Zapf designs ITC Zapf Dingbats, including the eight-spoked asterisk variant
4. 1985Zapf Dingbats ships built-in to Apple LaserWriter Plus
5. 1993Unicode 1.1 absorbs the Dingbats block. U+2733 EIGHT SPOKED ASTERISK enters the standard
6. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0 with full color presentation. Most vendors render it green

• •The word 'asterisk' comes from the Ancient Greek ἀστερίσκος (asteriskos), meaning 'little star.' It's the same root as 'astronomy' and 'disaster' (literally 'bad star').
• •Aristarchus of Samothrace invented the asterisk around 200 BCE at the Library of Alexandria to mark lines in Homer's epics that he thought were duplicated. He was doing what we'd now call textual criticism, 2,200 years before the first digital footnote.
• •Three asterisks in a triangle (⁂) is called an asterism), used in 19th-century typography for section breaks. Modern books replaced it with three horizontal asterisks ( *), also called a dinkus.
• •When Unicode inherited Zapf Dingbats in 1993, it kept eight different asterisk-style characters in the Dingbats block: U+2731 HEAVY ASTERISK, U+2732 OPEN CENTRE ASTERISK, U+2733 EIGHT SPOKED ASTERISK, U+2722 FOUR TEARDROP-SPOKED ASTERISK, and several others. Only ✳️ got emoji presentation.
• •On most vendor platforms (Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft), ✳️ is rendered in green, while ✴️ is orange and ✨ is yellow. The color assignments aren't part of Unicode, they're platform conventions established in the early 2010s for visual differentiation.
• •The Japanese mobile carriers that gave us emoji in the late 1990s, DoCoMo, KDDI, and SoftBank, all mapped pre-existing Dingbat symbols to emoji slots. ✳️ predates emoji culture by 15 years, it was grandfathered in, not invented.