List of proper names of stars

This is a list of proper names for stars, mostly derived from Arabic and Latin. See also the list of stars by constellation, which gives variant names, derivations, and magnitudes.

Of the roughly 10,000 stars visible to the naked eye, only a few hundred have been given proper names in the history of astronomy. Traditional astronomy tends to group stars into asterisms, and give proper names to those, not to individual stars.

In 2016, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) organized a Working Group on Star Names (WGSN) to catalog and standardize proper names for stars. The WGSN's first bulletin dated July 2016 included a table of the first two batches of names approved by the WGSN (on 30 June and 20 July 2016) together with names of stars adopted by the IAU Executive Committee Working Group on Public Naming of Planets and Planetary Satellites during the 2015 NameExoWorlds campaign and recognized by the WGSN. There are 125 stars on the list. Further batches of names were approved on 21 August 2016, 12 September 2016, 5 October 2016 and 6 November 2016. These were listed in a table included in the WGSN's second bulletin dated November 2016. There are 102 stars on this list. The next addition was done on 1 February 2017 with 13 new star names. All are included on the current IAU Catalog of Star Names, last updated on 1 February 2017.

Most star names are in origin descriptive of the part of the asterism they are found in; thus Cynosure is the "dog's tail", formerly "the star in the tail of the 'dog' asterism" (now Ursa Minor), or Phecda, a corruption of the Arabic fakhð ad-dubb "thigh of the bear". Only a handful of the brightest stars have individual proper names not depending on their asterism; so Sirius "the scorcher", Antares and Canopus (of unknown origin), Alphard "the solitary one", Regulus "kinglet"; and arguably Aldebaran "the follower" (of the Pleiades), Procyon "preceding the dog [Sirius]".

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