Asterisk

For the comic book series, see Asterix.
*
Asterisk
Asterisks used to illustrate a section break in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

An asterisk (*; from Late Latin asteriscus, from Ancient Greek ἀστερίσκος, asteriskos, "little star")[1][2] is a typographical symbol or glyph. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a star. Computer scientists and mathematicians often vocalize it as star (as, for example, in the A* search algorithm or C*-algebra). In English, an asterisk is usually five-pointed in sans-serif typefaces, six-pointed in serif typefaces, and six- or eight-pointed when handwritten. It can be used as censorship. It is also used on the internet to correct one's spelling, in which case it appears after or before the corrected word.

The asterisk is derived from the need of the printers of family trees in feudal times for a symbol to indicate date of birth. The original shape was seven-armed, each arm like a teardrop shooting from the center.

In computer science, the asterisk is commonly used as a wildcard character, or to denote pointers, repetition, or multiplication.

Usage

Censorship

Main article: Wordfilter

When toning down expletives, asterisks are often used to replace letters. For example, the word 'fuck' might become 'f*ck' or even '****'.

Competitive sports and games

Barry Bonds

Fans critical of Barry Bonds, who has been accused of using performance-enhancing drugs during his baseball career, invoked the asterisk notion during the 2007 season, as he approached and later broke Hank Aaron's career home run record.[7] Opposing fans would often hold up signs bearing asterisks whenever Bonds came up to bat. After Bonds hit his record-breaking 756th home run on August 7, 2007, fashion designer and entrepreneur Marc Ecko purchased the home run ball from the fan who caught it, and ran a poll on his Web site to determine its fate. On September 26, Ecko revealed on NBC's Today show that the ball will be branded with an asterisk and donated to the Baseball Hall of Fame. The ball, marked with a die-cut asterisk, was finally delivered to the hall on July 2, 2008 after Marc Ecko unconditionally donated the artifact rather than loaning it to the hall as originally intended.

Cricket

Computing

Computer science

Computer interfaces

Adding machines and printing calculators

Programming languages

Many programming languages and calculators use the asterisk as a symbol for multiplication. It also has a number of special meanings in specific languages, for instance:

Comments in computing

Main article: block comments

In the B programming language and languages that borrow syntax from it, like C, PHP, Java, or C#, comments (parts of the code not intended to be compiled into the program) are marked by an asterisk combined with the slash:

/* Here is a comment.
   The compiler will ignore it. */

Some Pascal-like programming languages, for example, Object Pascal, Modula-2, Modula-3, and Oberon, as well as several other languages including ML, Wolfram Language (Mathematica), AppleScript, OCaml, Standard ML, and Maple, use an asterisk combined with a parenthesis:

(* This is a comment.
   The compiler will ignore it. *)

CSS, while not strictly a programming language, also uses the slash-star comment format.

body {
  /* This ought to make the text more readable for far-sighted people */
  text-size:24pt;
}

Economics

Education

Fluid Mechanics

In fluid mechanics, an asterisk in superscript is sometimes used to mean a property at sonic speed.[8]

Games

Human genetics

Linguistics

In linguistics, an asterisk is placed before a word or phrase to indicate that it is not used, or there are no records of it being in use. This is used in several ways depending on what is being discussed.

Historical linguistics

In historical linguistics, the asterisk marks words or phrases that are not directly recorded in texts or other media, and that are therefore reconstructed on the basis of other linguistic material (see also comparative method).

In the following example, the Proto-Germanic word ainlif is a reconstructed form.

A double asterisk indicates a form that would be expected according to a rule, but is not actually found. That is, it indicates a reconstructed form that is not found or used, and in place of which another form is found in actual usage:

Generative linguistics

In generative linguistics, especially syntax, an asterisk in front of a word or phrase indicates that the word or phrase is not used because it is ungrammatical.

An asterisk before a parenthesis indicates that the lack of the word or phrase inside is ungrammatical, while an asterisk after the opening bracket of the parenthesis indicates that the existence of the word or phrase inside is ungrammatical.

Ambiguity

Since a word marked with an asterisk could mean either "unattested" or "impossible", it is important in some contexts to distinguish these meanings. In general, authors retain asterisks for "unattested", and prefix ˣ, **, or a superscript "?" for the latter meaning.

Marketing

Asterisks (or other symbols) are commonly used in advertisements to refer readers to special terms/conditions for a certain statement, commonly placed below the statement in question. For example: an advertisement for a sale may have an asterisk after the word "sale" with the date of the sale at the bottom of the advertisement, similar to the way footnotes are used.

Mathematics

The asterisk has many uses in mathematics. The following list highlights some common uses and is not exhaustive.

stand-alone
as a unary operator, denoted in prefix notation
as a unary operator, written as a subscript
as a unary operator, written as a superscript
as a binary operator, in infix notation

The asterisk is used in all branches of mathematics to designate a correspondence between two quantities denoted by the same letter – one with the asterisk and one without.

Mathematical typography

In fine mathematical typography, the Unicode character U+2217 asterisk operator (in HTML, ∗) is available. This character also appeared in the position of the regular asterisk in the PostScript symbol character set in the Symbol font included with Windows and Macintosh operating systems and with many printers. It should be used in fine typography for a large asterisk that lines up with the other mathematical operators.

Music

Religious texts

Star of Life

Replacement for cross/crescent/star on ambulances.

Statistical results

In many scientific publications, the asterisk is employed as a shorthand to denote the statistical significance of results when testing hypotheses. When the likelihood that a result occurred by chance alone is below a certain level, one or more asterisks are displayed. Popular significance levels are <0.05 (*), <0.01 (**), and <0.001 (***).

Telephony

On a Touch-Tone telephone keypad, the asterisk (called star, or less commonly, palm or sextile)[11] is one of the two special keys (the other is the number sign (pound sign or hash or, less commonly, octothorp[11] or square)), and is found to the left of the zero. They are used to navigate menus in Touch-Tone systems such as Voice mail, or in Vertical service codes.

Typography

   I had breakfast this mroning
   morning*
   I prefer serial
   *cereal
   I like toast
   don't*
   I asked for bread
   no bread*

Encodings

The Unicode standard states that the asterisk is distinct from:

The symbols are compared below (the display depends on your browser's font).

Asterisk Asterisk Operator Heavy Asterisk Small Asterisk Full Width Asterisk Open Centre Asterisk
*
Low Asterisk Arabic star East Asian reference mark Teardrop-Spoked Asterisk Sixteen Pointed Asterisk
٭
NameUnicodeDecimalUTF-8HTMLDisplayed
AsteriskU+002A&#42;2A&ast;*
Combining Asterisk BelowU+0359&#857;CD 99 ͙
Arabic Five Pointed StarU+066D&#1645;D9 AD ٭
East Asian Reference MarkU+203B&#8251;E2 80 BB 
Flower Punctuation MarkU+2055&#8277;E2 81 95 
AsterismU+2042&#8258;E2 81 82 
Low AsteriskU+204E&#8270;E2 81 8E 
Two Asterisks Aligned VerticallyU+2051&#8273;E2 81 91 
Combining Asterisk AboveU+20F0&#8432;E2 83 B0 
Asterisk OperatorU+2217&#8727;E2 88 97&lowast;
Circled Asterisk OperatorU+229B&#8859;E2 8A 9B 
Four Teardrop-Spoked AsteriskU+2722&#10018;E2 9C A2 
Four Balloon-Spoked AsteriskU+2723&#10019;E2 9C A3 
Heavy Four Balloon-Spoked AsteriskU+2724&#10020;E2 9C A4 
Four Club-Spoked AsteriskU+2725&#10021;E2 9C A5 
Heavy AsteriskU+2731&#10033;E2 9C B1 
Open Centre AsteriskU+2732&#10034;E2 9C B2 
Eight Spoked AsteriskU+2733&#10035;E2 9C B3 
Sixteen Pointed AsteriskU+273A&#10042;E2 9C BA 
Teardrop-Spoked AsteriskU+273B&#10043;E2 9C BB 
Open Centre Teardrop-Spoked AsteriskU+273C&#10044;E2 9C BC 
Heavy Teardrop-Spoked AsteriskU+273D&#10045;E2 9C BD 
Heavy Teardrop-Spoked Pinwheel AsteriskU+2743&#10051;E2 9D 83 
Balloon-Spoked AsteriskU+2749&#10057;E2 9D 89 
Six Teardrop-Spoked Propeller AsteriskU+274A&#10058;E2 9D 8A 
Heavy Eight Teardrop-Spoked Propeller AsteriskU+274B&#10059;E2 9D 8B 
Squared AsteriskU+29C6&#10694;E2 A7 86 
Equals With AsteriskU+2A6E&#10862;E2 A9 AE 
Slavonic AsteriskU+A673&#42611;EA 99 B3 
Small AsteriskU+FE61&#65121;EF B9 A1 
Full Width AsteriskU+FF0A&#65290;EF BC 8A 
Music Symbol Pedal Up MarkU+1D1AF&#119215;F0 9D 86 AF 𝆯
Tag AsteriskU+E002A&#917546;F3 A0 80 AA 
Light Five Spoked AsteriskU+1F7AF&#128943;F0 9F 9E AF 🞯
Medium Five Spoked AsteriskU+1F7B0&#128944;F0 9F 9E B0 🞰
Bold Five Spoked AsteriskU+1F7B1&#128945;F0 9F 9E B1 🞱
Heavy Five Spoked AsteriskU+1F7B2&#128946;F0 9F 9E B2 🞲
Very Heavy Five Spoked AsteriskU+1F7B3&#128947;F0 9F 9E B3 🞳
Extremely Heavy Five Spoked AsteriskU+1F7B4&#128948;F0 9F 9E B4 🞴
Light Six Spoked AsteriskU+1F7B5&#128949;F0 9F 9E B5 🞵
Medium Six Spoked AsteriskU+1F7B6&#128950;F0 9F 9E B6 🞶
Bold Six Spoked AsteriskU+1F7B7&#128951;F0 9F 9E B7 🞷
Heavy Six Spoked AsteriskU+1F7B8&#128952;F0 9F 9E B8 🞸
Very Heavy Six Spoked AsteriskU+1F7B9&#128953;F0 9F 9E B9 🞹
Extremely Heavy Six Spoked AsteriskU+1F7BA&#128954;F0 9F 9E BA 🞺
Light Eight Spoked AsteriskU+1F7BB&#128955;F0 9F 9E BB 🞻
Medium Eight Spoked AsteriskU+1F7BC&#128956;F0 9F 9E BC 🞼
Bold Eight Spoked AsteriskU+1F7BD&#128957;F0 9F 9E BD 🞽
Heavy Eight Spoked AsteriskU+1F7BE&#128958;F0 9F 9E BE 🞾
Very Heavy Eight Spoked AsteriskU+1F7BF&#128959;F0 9F 9E BF 🞿

See also

References

  1. "asterisk", American Heritage Dictionary
  2. ἀστερίσκος, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus
  3. See e.g. Allen Barra (2007-05-27). "An Asterisk is very real, even when it's not". New York Times.
  4. Baseball Almanac - Scoring Baseball: Advanced Symbols
  5. Facebook.com
  6. Adcouncil.org, Ad Council, August 8, 2008
  7. See e.g. Michael Wilbon (2004-12-04). "Tarnished records deserve an Asterisk". Washington Post. p. D10.
  8. White, F. M. Fluid Mechanics, Fourth Ed. WCB McGraw Hill.
  9. "Scrabble Glossary". Tucson Scrabble Club. Retrieved 2012-02-06.
  10. Complex Conjugate - from Wolfram MathWorld
  11. 1 2 US 3920926
  12. Zimmer, Ben. "The cyberpragmatics of bounding asterisks". Language Log, University of Pennsylvania. Retrieved 24 August 2013.
  13. "Detailed descriptions of the characters (The ISO Latin 1 character repertoire)". 2006-09-20. Retrieved 2015-03-23.
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