Stars are often used as a medium to rate the quality of products. They are used by reviewers for ranking things such as films, TV shows, restaurants, and hotels. For example, a system of one to five stars is commonly employed to rate hotels, with five stars being the highest quality.
This type of rating system was first seen in Mariana Starke's 1820 guidebook, which used exclamation mark to indicate works of art of special value:
..I have endeavoured... to furnish Travellers with correct lists of the objects best worth notice...; at the same time marking, with one or more exclamation points (according to their merit), those works which are deemed peculiarly excellent.
Murray's Handbooks for Travellers and then the Baedeker Guides (starting in 1844) borrowed this system, using stars instead of exclamation points, first for points of interest, and later for hotels.
The Michelin restaurant guide introduced a star as a restaurant rating in 1926, and expanded to a system of one to three stars in 1931.
And eventually, the star rating system was opted across the globe to rate the products. But the rating range was not always 0–5 but some reviewers use a range of 0.5 to 4 also and many other different ranges of rating.
Critics have different ways of denoting the lowest rating when this is a "zero". Some such as Peter Travers display empty stars. Jonathan Rosenbaum and Dave Kehr use a round black dot. Leslie Halliwell uses a blank space.The Globe and Mail uses a "0", or as their former film critic dubbed it, the "death doughnut".Roger Ebert used a thumbs-down symbol.Other critics use a black dot.
And today, the star rating system is used not only in the fields of business and entertainment but also to describe the military ranks in many countries.
source: wikipedia
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