Asterisk (*)

How to read it

The American Heritage Dictionary lists its main uses as marking an omission, a reference to a footnote, or an unattested word, sound or affix, and in mathematics as a sign for multiplication, as in 2 * 3 = 6. Unicode encodes it as U+002A ASTERISK, with the alias “star”, and notes that it “can have five or six spokes”. Merriam-Webster records a figurative sense: an asterisk thought of as attached to an achievement in a record book, to show that a limiting fact makes it less impressive than it looks.

Also searched as: *, asterisk meaning, asterisk symbol.

As a footnote mark

The asterisk is the first of the traditional footnote symbols. The US Government Publishing Office’s Style Manual gives the order as asterisk, Dagger (†) (†), double dagger (‡) and section mark (§). If more are needed the marks may be doubled or tripled, though the manual prefers adding other single symbols. The same manual uses three asterisks, spaced, as an ellipsis, and a line of asterisks for one or more whole paragraphs left out of a quotation.

In maths and computing

In programming languages the asterisk is the multiplication operator: the Python Language Reference says “the * (multiplication) operator yields the product of its arguments”. The multiplication sign × is a separate character. Unicode also has an asterisk operator ∗ (U+2217), which it says may represent the star key on a telephone keypad.

Asterisks for missing letters

Asterisks often replace the letters of a swear word or a name. CMOS Shop Talk notes that in common usage asterisks stand in for omitted names where Chicago itself uses a 2-em dash. The Guardian’s style guide rules out asterisks in swear words and calls them “just a cop-out”. In linguistics, according to Merriam-Webster and the American Heritage Dictionary, an asterisk marks a hypothetical or unattested form, one not found in any surviving text.

Look-alikes

Three asterisks in a triangle, ⁂ (U+2042), are an asterism, which the American Heritage Dictionary describes as a printer’s mark calling attention to a following passage. Unicode separates the asterisk from the low asterisk ⁎ (U+204E), the star operator ⋆ (U+22C6) and the reference mark ※ (U+203B). Butterick’s Practical Typography says asterisks are “too small and too high” to work as bullets.