These names of stars that have either been approved by the International Astronomical Union or which have been in somewhat recent use. IAU approval comes mostly from its Working Group on Star Names, which has been publishing a "List of IAU-approved Star Names" since 2016.

As of April 2022, the list included a total of 451 proper names of starsc

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 constellations or asterisms and give proper names to those, not to individual stars.