Flags With Stars (83)

Where these 83 flags are in the world

Counting by continent is the quickest way to see whether a design tradition is regional or global. Africa accounts for the largest share of this collection with 28 of the 83.

Stars usually count something

On most flags a star is not decoration, it is arithmetic. The fifty on the United States flag are its states, and the count has been revised twenty-six times as the country grew. The five on China's flag are the Communist Party and four social classes. The six on Australia's are the states plus a federal territory, arranged as the Southern Cross and the Commonwealth Star. Where you can count the stars, you can usually work out what the country was trying to say about itself at the moment of adoption.

This is why star counts are worth checking rather than glancing at. Two flags with a similar layout can differ only in how many points each star has — the United States uses five-pointed stars, while Australia's Commonwealth Star has seven, one per state plus territories. Confusing them is the most common mistake people make with the two flags at a distance.

The Southern Cross family

A distinct group of flags in the southern hemisphere shows the same constellation. Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Samoa and Brazil all depict the Southern Cross, which is visible year-round from their latitudes and never from most of Europe. The constellation is the same; the treatment is not. New Zealand shows four stars where Australia shows five, which is the fastest way to tell those two flags apart, and Brazil renders an entire sky of twenty-seven stars as seen from outside the celestial sphere, one per state and federal district.

Stars and crescents travel together

A large share of star-bearing flags pair the star with a crescent moon, a combination inherited from Ottoman use and now associated with a number of Muslim-majority countries. If the flag you are trying to place has both, the crescent is the more useful filter of the two, because far fewer flags carry one.