The asterisk (), , is a typographical symbol that is a stylised image of a star. An asterisk is usually five- or six-pointed in print and six- or eight-pointed when handwritten, though more complex forms exist. Its most common use is to call out a footnote. It is also often used to censor words considered offensive. It is often vocalized as star, especially by computer scientists and mathematicians (as, for example, in the A* search algorithm or C*-algebra).
Etymology
The English term asterisk is from Late Latin , from Ancient Greek , , "little star"."asterisk" , American Heritage Dictionaryἀστερίσκος , Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus
The word asterisk is sometimes said as if it were pronounced astericks or asterix due to a process called metathesis. Because of this, some people have erroneously inferred that astericks is the plural of a singular asterick. A 2014 survey of the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language found that 24% of panelists thought the asterix pronunciation was acceptable and 19% found asterick to be acceptable. However, only 7% and 6% of panelists preferred the pronunciation of asterix and asterick respectively.
History
One hypothesis for the origin of the asterisk used to mark notes is that it stems from the 5,000-year-old Sumerian character dingir, ,Robert Bringhurst, "Asterisk," in The Elements of Typographic Style: Version 3.2 (Vancouver, BC: Hartley & Marks, 2008), 303. though this hypothesis seems to only be based on visual appearance.
The asterisk was one of several symbols developed by scholars of Homeric poetry at the Library of Alexandria over 2,000 years ago. Zenodotus, the first librarian at the Alexandrian Mouseion, used the obelus, a symbol placed in the margins to indicate a line found to be spurious. A later librarian, Aristophanes, continued the use of the obelus along with other textual notations like a small star for passages that did not make sense. Aristophanes' student and successor, Aristarchus of Samothrace, introduced a formal system of textual criticism marks including the obelus, , and several other Aristarchian symbols. Aristarchus used the to mark lines that were duplicated elsewhere, and the asterisk combined with the obelus to indicate lines considered to be spurious duplications.Kathleen McNamee, "Sigla," in Sigla and Select Marginalia in Greek Literary Papyri (Brussels: Fondation Egyptologique Reine Elisabeth, 1992), 9. Origen is known to have later used the asteriskos to mark missing Hebrew lines from his Hexapla.McNamee, "Sigla," 12. In the Middle Ages, the asterisk (along with other symbols like the manicule) was used to emphasize a particular part of a text, often linking those parts of the text to a marginal comment. The asterisk was frequently used to indicate footnotes in the era of print media.
Usage
Censorship
When toning down expletives, asterisks are often used to replace letters. For example, the word "badword" might become "ba***rd", "b*****d", "b******" or even "*******". Vowels tend to be censored with an asterisk more than consonants, but the intelligibility of censored profanities with multiple syllables such as "b*dw*rd" and "b*****d" or "ba****d", or uncommon ones is higher if put in context with surrounding text.Wutiolarn, Nopsarun, and Damrong Attaprechakul. A study of nonstandard orthography and vowel omission in an international online game: AuditionSEA. Language Institute, Thammasat University, 2012. In comics, an entire swear word may be replaced with a grawlix, a string of typographic symbols used to indicate undefined profanity.
Asterisks are one method used to redact nonpublic information. When a document containing classified information is published, the document may be redacted or "sanitized" by replacing the classified information with asterisks. This has notably been the case in the public release of the UK's Intelligence and Security Committee Russia report.
Competitive sports and games In colloquial usage, an asterisk attached to a sporting record indicates that it is somehow tainted. This is because results that have been considered dubious or set aside are recorded in the record books with an asterisk rendering to a footnote explaining the reason or reasons for concern. During the first decades of the 21st century, the asterisk came to denote a tainted accomplishment, initially due to its use in North American sports records. This "tainted" usage soon spread to American politics.
Baseball
The usage of the term in sports arose during the 1961 baseball season in which Roger Maris of the New York Yankees was threatening to break Babe Ruth's 34-year-old single-season home run record. Ruth had amassed 60 home runs in a season with only 154 games, but Maris was playing the first season in the American League's newly expanded 162-game season. Baseball Commissioner Ford C. Frick, a friend of Ruth's during the legendary slugger's lifetime, held a press conference to announce his "ruling" that should Maris take longer than 154 games both records would be acknowledged by Major League Baseball, but that some "distinctive mark" [his term] be placed next to Maris', which should be listed alongside Ruth's achievement in the "record books". The asterisk as such a mark was suggested at that time by New York Daily News sportswriter Dick Young, not Frick. The reality, however, was that MLB had no direct control over any record books until many years later, and it all was merely a suggestion on Frick's part. Within a few years the controversy died down and all prominent baseball record keepers listed Maris as the single-season record holder for as long as he held the record.
Nevertheless, the stigma of holding a tainted record remained with Maris for many years, and the concept of a real or figurative asterisk denoting less-than-accepted "official" records has become widely used in sports and other competitive endeavors. A 2001 TV movie about Maris's record-breaking season was called 61* (pronounced sixty-one asterisk) in reference to the controversy.
Uproar over the integrity of baseball records and whether or not qualifications should be added to them arose again in the late 1990s, when a steroid-fueled power explosion led to the shattering of Maris' record. Even though it was obvious - and later admitted - by Mark McGwire that he was heavily on steroids when he hit 70 home runs in 1998, ruling authorities did nothing - to the annoyance of many fans and sportswriters. Three years later self-confessed steroid-user Barry Bonds pushed that record out to 73, and fans once again began to call for an asterisk in the sport's record books.
Fans were especially critical and clamored louder for baseball to act during the 2007 season, as Bonds approached and later broke Hank Aaron's career home run record of 755.
The Houston Astros' 2017 World Series win was marred after an investigation by MLB revealed the team's involvement in a sign-stealing scheme during that season. Fans, appalled by what they perceived to be overly lenient discipline against the Astros players, nicknamed the team the "Houston Asterisks".
Cricket The asterisk has several uses in cricket: It signifies a total number of runs scored by a batsman without losing their wicket; e.g. "107*" means "107 not out". Where only the scores of the two batsmen that are currently in are being shown, an asterisk following a batsman's score indicates that he is due to face the next ball to be delivered. When written before a player's name on a scorecard, it indicates the captain of the team. It is also used on television when giving a career statistic during a match. For example, "47*" in a number of matches column means that the current game is the player's 47th.
Computing In computer science, the asterisk is commonly used as a wildcard character, or to denote pointers, repetition, or multiplication.
In regular expressions, the asterisk is used to denote zero or more repetitions of a pattern; this use is also known as the Kleene star or Kleene closure after Stephen Kleene. In Unified Modeling Language, the asterisk is used to denote zero to many classes. In some command line interfaces, such as Unix shells and Microsoft's CMD, the asterisk is the wildcard character (or wildcard symbol) and stands for any string of characters. A common use of the wildcard is in searching for files on a computer. For instance, if a user wished to find a document called Document 1, search terms such as Doc* and D*ment* would return this file. Due to being a wildcard, they could also return files like Document 2 and (only the latter) Dark Knight Monument.jpg. Document* would in fact return any file that begins with Document, and D*ment* any file that began with D and had 'ment' somewhere in its name. In some graphical user interfaces, an asterisk is pre- or affixed to the current working document name shown in a window's title bar to indicate that unsaved changes exist. In many computing and Internet applications, an asterisk is displayed in place of the characters of sensitive or confidential visible information, such as a password. In Commodore (and related) file systems, an asterisk appearing next to a filename in a directory listing denotes an improperly closed file, commonly called a "splat file". In travel industry Global Distribution Systems, the asterisk is the display command to retrieve all or part of a Passenger Name Record. In HTML web forms, a (usually red) asterisk can be used to denote required fields. Chat room etiquette calls on one asterisk to correct a misspelled word or typo that has already been submitted. For example, one could post lck, then follow it with *luck or luck* (the placement of the * on the left or right is a matter of personal style) to correct the word's spelling, or if it's someone else that notices the mistake, they might also use *luck or luck*. This also applies to typos that result in a different word from the intended one but are correctly spelled. In comics, enclosing a word or phrase between two asterisks is used to denote an action the subject is "performing", e.g. *cough*. In Markdown and other markup languages, surrounding a set of characters or words in one asterisk italicizes, two asterisks bolds, and three asterisks both italicizes and bolds. See the table below for examples of all three uses of the asterisk in Markdown, including how it translates to HTML and how it renders. MarkdownHTMLRendered OutputItalicized text is the cat's meow.I just love bold text.This text is really important.
Adding machines and printing calculators Some models of adding machines and printing calculators use the asterisk to denote the total, or the terminal sum or difference of an addition or subtraction sequence, respectively. The symbol is sometimes given on the printout to indicate this total.
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: In some languages such as C, C++, Rust and Go, the asterisk is used to dereference or declare a pointer variable. In Common Lisp, the names of global variables are conventionally set off with asterisks, *LIKE-THIS*. In Ada, Fortran, Perl, Python, Ruby, some dialects of Pascal, and many others, a double asterisk is used to signify exponentiation: 5**3 is 53 = 125. In Perl, the asterisk is used to refer to the typeglob of all variables with a given name.