The Named Stars : A Guide to the 110 Stars That Survived

The Named Stars: How a Handful of Points of Light Got the Names We Still Use

Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, Vega, Algol, Deneb, Rigel, Altair, Fomalhaut, named stars, the names rattle off the tongue as we watch the night sky. To an English speaker, they don’t quite sound as if they have a Latin derivative, and they do not. These names come from Arabic star catalogs written during the golden age of Islam, from the 8th to the 13th centuries CE. Islamic scholars were themselves working with constellation figures recorded by Ptolemy. European astronomers took Arabic words and transliterated them into Latin during the 11th to 13th centuries. They persist to this day, and the IAU has officially standardized around 450 star names. Only a small fraction of naked-eye stars have proper names at all, roughly 300 with traditional names out of approximately 9,000 visible to the naked eye.

Underneath this surface roll-call sit four distinct naming traditions, each with its own century and its own logic. Arabic gave the majority. Greek and Latin gave smaller layers. And in the last decade, the International Astronomical Union has begun formally adding names from cultures whose star records were never folded into the European catalogs in the first place. GoRhyme’s working set of 110 stars is curated against this mix, drawn from the names with the strongest cultural and etymological lineage rather than every entry the IAU has ever standardized. A small set, against the 9,000 stars the naked eye can take in, and a vanishingly small set against the few hundred billion that the Milky Way actually holds.

The Arabic Inheritance

When we look at individual star names, Arabic star names predominate. Because they are often named by their position in a constellation, the names reference physical description. Al-Sufi, a Persian astronomer (903–986 CE), wrote a book called the Book of the Fixed Stars in 964 CE, describing the 48 constellations and the stars within them, including their relationships to other constellation figures. It is a landmark catalog written in Arabic within the Islamic scholarly tradition. Among the named stars in our opening list: Aldebaran comes from the Arabic al-dabarān, “the follower,” so called because it follows the Pleiades across the sky. Betelgeuse comes from yad al-jawzā’, “the hand of the giant,” though a medieval European scribal misread of the Arabic letter yā’ as bā’ corrupted the name, producing “bet-” instead of “yad-” and shifting the meaning from “hand of the giant” to “armpit of the giant.” Rigel comes from rijl al-jawzā’, “the left foot of the giant.” On an interesting note, Book of the Fixed Stars was partially translated into English in 2010, nearly 1,000 years after Al-Sufi’s death, though it had been translated to French in 1830.

What set Al-Sufi’s catalog apart in early astronomy times was that it did not merely copy Ptolemy’s positions. He observed the sky himself, refined the star magnitudes the Almagest had recorded, and added Arabic asterisms alongside the inherited Greek figures. He is also the first known astronomer to describe what we now call the Andromeda Galaxy, which he wrote about as “a small cloud.” His catalog served as the reference for Islamic astronomy for hundreds of years.

The other names from the opening list are cut from the same cloth. Vega is from al-nasr al-wāqi’, the falling eagle, since Arabic astronomers saw Lyra as a swooping bird rather than a lyre. Altair is its pair: al-nasr al-ṭā’ir, the flying eagle, soaring rather than diving. Deneb comes from dhanab al-dajājah, the tail of the hen, the Cygnus figure read as a hen in the Arabic tradition. Fomalhaut is fam al-ḥūt, the mouth of the fish, and Mizar, the middle star of the Big Dipper’s handle, is from mi’zar, the wrapper or girdle. Algol, the demon star of Perseus, is ra’s al-ghūl, the head of the ghoul, sitting where the Greek tradition placed Medusa’s severed head. Algol is also the first known eclipsing binary, dimming by about a magnitude every 2.87 days, which may well be the original reason the medieval name reaches for something monstrous.

The way Arabic names entered Europe goes through the translation schools of medieval Spain, most importantly Toledo in the 12th and 13th centuries, where Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin scholars worked side by side translating Arabic scientific texts into Latin. The translators kept the Arabic star names rather than inventing new ones, but they were often working by ear and copying script they could not always parse cleanly. The errors hardened over generations of further copying, which is how a fair number of the names we use today carry the fingerprints of a medieval Spanish scriptorium more than the original Arabic phrase.

The Greek Layer

The Greek-derived names are fewer in number, and they tend to do a different kind of work, less describing a star’s place in a figure and more describing the star itself.

Greek star names are derived from both the Greek language and the works of Claudius Ptolemy (c. 100–170 CE). It would be difficult to overestimate his impact; his geocentric model of the universe held sway in European and Islamic astronomy from ancient times through the Copernican revolution in the 16th century. Greek names tend to describe the star itself, its brightness, color, or behavior.

Sirius comes from the Greek word seirios, “scorching” or “glowing,” referring to its status as the brightest star in the night sky.

Arcturus comes from the Greek arktouros, “bear-watcher,” as it appears to follow Ursa Major across the sky.

Antares comes from anti-Arēs, “rival of Mars,” named for its red color rivaling that of Mars.

Procyon originates from prokyōn, “before the dog,” as it rises before Sirius, the dog star.

A Smaller Latin Trace

Though less prominent, Renaissance astronomers and atlas makers assigned Latin names to some stars. Regulus means “little king” and the name is associated with Copernicus, who popularized it, though it has earlier medieval roots. Spica is named for “ear of grain,” held in the hand of the figure of Virgo in its constellation. Finally, Polaris, the “pole star,” is Latin-derived but the name is post-medieval; it has been near the celestial pole since around 500 CE and will remain so until roughly 2100 CE, when precession will carry it away. In astronomical terms, that is a recent tenure.

Cor Caroli, the alpha star of Canes Venatici, is later still and more deliberate, the Latin phrase for “Charles’s heart,” coined in the late 17th century to honor Charles I of England. The naming is closer to a memorial than a description, a rare case of a star carrying a political dedication rather than a physical or mythic one. Polaris itself will not hold its role much longer; the axis is already swinging past it.

The Voices Being Added Back

But of course, Arabic, European, and Greek traditions were not the only cultures that named stars. Many other systems of nomenclature exist; they simply were not absorbed into the unstandardized naming system that modern astronomy inherited. In fact, before 2016, star names were not standardized at all; the same star might have several spellings or variant names in use simultaneously, a source of confusion across catalogs and atlases. To address this, the IAU Working Group on Star Names (WGSN) was established in 2016 and has been formally adding and standardizing names since then. Not only are they creating a uniform database, they are also adding star names from Chinese, Indigenous Australian, Polynesian, Inuit, and other traditions. The named-star record, in other words, is still being written.

The list is dynamic and there are new stars being added. Tianyi, the iota star of Draco, carries the Chinese name for celestial unity, formally adopted in 2017. Barnard’s Star, which moves faster across the sky than any other star known, is named for the American astronomer who first noticed that motion in 1916, a reminder that some “names” in the modern catalog are honorifics from inside the discipline rather than inheritances from an older tradition. The IAU’s 2018 working list took in names from Indigenous Australian, Polynesian, Inuit, and other star-naming cultures whose records were oral or otherwise outside the European chain of catalogs.

Why Different Traditions Named Different Things

There is a pattern in all of this worth pulling out, because once you see it the names start to organize themselves. The Arabic names tend to describe a star’s role inside a figure: the follower, the hand, the foot, the tail, the wing, the wrapper, the head. They read like labels on a diagram, which is essentially what they were. Arabic astronomers inherited the Greek constellation figures from Ptolemy and set about naming the parts. The Greek and Latin names, by contrast, tend to describe the star itself: its color, its brightness, its behavior, its mythic identity. Sirius is scorching. Antares rivals Mars. Regulus is little king. The two approaches answer different questions about a point of light, and most of our modern names are a mix of the two, depending on which tradition got there first and which translation chain carried the word forward.

Letters and Numbers, for the Rest

Most stars do not have names; many are designated only by a Greek letter or a number.

The Greek letters come from Johann Bayer, a German astronomer who published Uranometria in 1603, the first star atlas to cover the entire celestial sphere. He assigned Greek letters (α, β, γ…) to stars within each constellation, ordered roughly by brightness, so α is usually the brightest and β the second brightest, though he was not always consistent. These designations coexist with proper names, Vega, for example, is both α Lyrae and Vega, both correct in different contexts.

John Flamsteed (1725) added another layer to star names, numbering all the stars he could see within each constellation by right ascension, so many stars also carry Flamsteed numbers.

Beyond that, most stars appear only in modern catalogs, such as the HD (Henry Draper catalog), HIP (Hipparcos catalog), and HYG, which together cover millions of stars but still represent only a fraction of the estimated 100 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way. A proper name is a rare distinction; most stars are numbers, and most are not even that.

What Survives

In the end, what we call the stars comes from thousands of years of copying, mistranslation, and garbled transliteration; at the oldest records, even those came from earlier civilizations.

Some medieval names have nearly evaporated. Cor Leonis, “the heart of the lion,” was Regulus’s standard label in European astronomy for centuries before the shorter Latin name took over. Polaris itself was often called Cynosura, after a Greek epithet for the Little Bear, and Stella Polaris before settling into its current single-word form. The IAU’s freeze is the first time in the history of the catalog that the names have been held still. Before that, looking up a star meant choosing between several spellings depending on which atlas you opened.