Stars

How to spell stars

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stars

What does stars mean?

1. nounLuminous points of light in the night sky, each a distant sun.
2. nounFamous and admired performers in film, music, or sport.
3. verbAppears as the leading performer in a film, show, or production.

Stars in a sentence

• noun

  On a clear night far from the city, thousands of stars are visible.

• noun

  The awards ceremony attracted film stars from around the world.

• verb

  She stars in the new drama series that premieres next month.

• noun

  The astronomer spent years mapping the brightest stars in the southern sky.

• noun

  Young athletes often look up to the stars of professional sport.

• verb

  The actor regularly stars in low-budget independent films.

Where does stars come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word goes back to the Old English steorra, meaning a fixed point of light in the night sky, and it belongs to a broad Germanic family that includes the Dutch ster and the German Stern. All of these descend from a much older Indo-European root that also produced the Latin stella and the Greek aster, both meaning 'star', which is why words like 'stellar', 'astronomy', and 'asterisk' feel like distant cousins. The everyday spelling has stayed remarkably steady for over a thousand years, settling on the simple 'star' with the plural and verb form taking a plain '-s'. The figurative sense of a 'star' as a celebrated performer is much younger, emerging in English in the early 1800s from the idea of someone who shines above the rest. Because the word is short and phonetically regular, the spelling holds no real surprises.

How the word is built

• star (the celestial body)
• -s (plural / third-person singular marker)