The sextile is an aspect in Astrology, a symbol to represent that aspect, and a typographical symbol used in telephony. The symbol represents the radii of a hexagon.
Astrology
In astrology, a sextile aspect is one of 60º, which is of the 360° ecliptic or a trine (120°). Depending on the involved planets, an orb of 4-5° is allowed.
Other uses The more notable of the other uses of the symbol are as a star key on a telephone keypad and on a Viewdata keyboard. This usage first appeared in a 1973 US patent filing (3,920,926). "The pad 1 provides keys for numerals 0 to 9, while the sextile or asterisk (*) key is decoded to provide a decimal point and the octothorp (#) key generates a command [etc]" Early prototypes of the touch-tone telephone used keys with a star and diamond shape. According to Bell engineer Doug Kerr, these were replaced with the sextile and octothorpe because those could be typed or approximated with the ASCII character set or an office typewriter.
See also French Republican calendar, in which a leap year was called
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