Asterisk

History

Usage

Censorship

Competitive sports and games

Baseball

• In recent years, the asterisk has come into use on baseball scorecards to denote a "great defensive play."

  Usage in anti-doping campaigns

• By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the association of baseball and its records with doping had become so notorious that the term "asterisk" had become firmly associated with doping in sport. In February 2011 the United States Olympic Committee and the Ad Council launched an anti-steroid campaign called "Play Asterisk Free" aimed at teens. The campaign, whose logo uses a heavy asterisk, first launched in 2008 under the name Don't Be An Asterisk.

  Cricket

• In cricket, it signifies a total number of runs scored by a batsman without losing his 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.

  Other sports

Computing

Computer science

• In computer science, the asterisk is used in regular expressions 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 the Unified Modeling Language, the asterisk is used to denote zero to many classes.

  Computer interfaces

• In some command line interfaces, such as the Unix shell and Microsoft's CMD, the asterisk is the wildcard character and stands for any string of characters. This is also known as a wildcard symbol. 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. Document* would also return any file that begins with Document.
• In some graphical user interfaces an asterisk is pre- or appended 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, or another character, is displayed to indicate that a character of a password or other confidential information has been entered, without the risk of displaying the actual character.
• In Commodore filesystems, 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, an asterisk can be used to denote required fields.
• Chat room etiquette calls on one asterisk to correct a misspelled word that has already been submitted. For example, one could post lck, then follow it with *luck or luck* to correct the word's spelling, or if it's someone else that notices the mistake, they might also use *luck or luck*.
• * Enclosing a phrase between two asterisks is used to denote an action the user is "performing", e.g. *pulls out a paper*, although this usage is also common on forums, and less so on most chat rooms due to /me or similar commands. Hyphens and double colons as well as the operator /me are also used for similar purposes.

  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

• In some programming languages such as the C, C++, and Go programming languages, the asterisk is used to dereference or to declare a pointer variable.
• In the Common Lisp programming language, the names of global variables are conventionally set off with asterisks, *LIKE-THIS*.
• In the Ada, Fortran, Perl, Python, Ruby programming languages, in some dialects of the Pascal programming language, and many others, a double asterisk is used to signify exponentiation: 5**3 is 5³ = 125.
• In the Perl programming language, the asterisk is used to refer to the typeglob of all variables with a given name.
• In the programming languages Ruby and Python, * has two specific uses. First, the unary * operator applied to a list object inside a function call will expand that list into the arguments of the function call. Second, a parameter preceded by * in the parameter list for a function will result in any extra positional parameters being aggregated into a tuple or array, and likewise a parameter preceded by ** will result in any extra keyword parameters being aggregated into a dictionary or hash.
• In the APL language, the asterisk represents the exponential and exponentiation functions, with *X representing e ^X, and Y*X representing Y ^X.
• In IBM Job Control Language, the asterisk has various functions, including in-stream data in the DD statement, the default print stream as SYSOUT=*, and as a self-reference in place of a procedure step name to refer to the same procedure step where it appears.
• In Haskell, the asterisk represents the set of well-formed, fully applied types; that is, a 0-ary kind of types.

  Comments in programming languages

Economics

• In economics, the use of an asterisk after a letter indicating a variable such as price, output, or employment indicates that the variable is at its optimal level. For instance, p* is the price level p when output y is at its corresponding optimal level of y*.
• Also in international economics asterisks are commonly used to denote economic variables in a foreign country. So, for example, "p" is the price of the home good and "p*" is the price of the foreign good, etc.

  Education

• In the GCSE and A-Level examinations in the United Kingdom and the PSLE in Singapore, A* is a special top grade that is distinguished from grade A.
• In the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education examination in Hong Kong, 5** and 5* are two special top grades that are distinguished from Level 5. Level 5** is the highest level a candidate can attain in HKDSE.

  Fluid mechanics

Games

• Certain categories of character types in role-playing games are called splats, and the game supplements describing them are called splatbooks. This usage originated with the shorthand "*book" for this type of supplement to various World of Darkness games, such as Clanbook: Ventrue or Tribebook: Black Furies, and this usage has spread to other games with similar character-type supplements. For example, Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition has had several lines of splatbooks: the "X & Y" series including Sword & Fist and Tome & Blood prior to the "3.5" revision, the "Complete X" series including Complete Warrior and Complete Divine, and the "Races of X" series including Races of Stone and Races of the Wild.
• In many MUDs and MOOs, as well as "male", "female", and other more esoteric genders, there is a gender called "splat", which uses an asterisk to replace the letters that differ in standard English gender pronouns. For example, h* is used rather than him or her. Also, asterisks are used to signify doing an action, for example, "*action*".
• Game show producer Mark Goodson used a six-pointed asterisk as his trademark. It is featured prominently on many set pieces from The Price Is Right.
• Scrabble players put an asterisk after a word to indicate that an illegal play was made.

  Human genetics

• In human genetics, * is used to denote that someone is a member of a haplogroup and not any of its subclades.

  Linguistics

Historical linguistics

• *ainlif → → eleven

• For the plural, **kubar would be expected, but separate masculine plural akābir and feminine plural kubrayāt are found as irregular forms.

  Ungrammaticality

• wake her up / *wake up her

• go * the station - Here, "go the station" would be ungrammatical.
• go home - Here, "go to home" would be ungrammatical.

  Ambiguity

Optimality theory

Phonetic transcription

Mathematics

• An arbitrary point in some set. Seen, for example, when computing Riemann sums or when contracting a simply connected group to the singleton set.

• The Hodge star operator on vector spaces.

• The pushforward of a smooth map f between two smooth manifolds, denoted f_∗.
• And more generally the application of any covariant functor, where no doubt exists over which functor is meant.

• The complex conjugate of a complex number.
• The conjugate in a composition algebra
• The conjugate transpose, Hermitian transpose, or adjoint matrix of a matrix.
• Hermitian adjoint.
• The multiplicative group of a ring, especially when the ring is a field. E.g.
• The dual space of a vector space V, denoted V*.
• The combination of an indexed collection of objects into one example, e.g. the combination of all the cohomology groups H^k into the cohomology ring H*.
• The reflexive transitive closure of a binary relation.
• In statistics, z* and t* are given critical points for z-distributions and t-distributions, respectively.

• A notation for an arbitrary binary operator.
• The free product of two groups.
• f ∗ g is a convolution of f with g.
• A notation for the horizontal composition of two natural transformations.
• A notation to denote a parallel sum of two operands.

Mathematical typography

Music

• In musical notation the sign indicates when the sustain pedal of the piano should be lifted.
• In liturgical music, an asterisk is often used to denote a deliberate pause.

  Religious texts

• In the Geneva Bible and the King James Bible, an asterisk is used to indicate a marginal comment or scripture reference.
• In the Leeser Bible, an asterisk is used to mark off the seven subdivisions of the weekly Torah portion. It is also used to mark the few verses to be repeated by the reader of the Haftara.
• In American printings of the Book of Common Prayer, an asterisk is used to divide a verse of a Psalm in two portions for responsive reading. British printings use a spaced colon for the same purpose.

  Star of Life

Statistical results

Telephony

Typography

• The asterisk is used to call out a footnote, especially when there is only one on the page. Less commonly, multiple asterisks are used to denote different footnotes on a page. Typically, an asterisk is positioned after a word or phrase and preceding its accompanying footnote. Other characters are also used for this purpose, including †, ‡, superscript numbers, etc. In marketing and advertising, asterisks or other symbols are used to refer readers discreetly to terms or conditions for a certain statement, the "small print".
• In English-language typography the asterisk is placed after all other punctuation marks except for the dash.
• Three spaced asterisks centered on a page may represent a jump to a different scene, thought, or section.

• A group of three asterisks arranged in a triangular formation is called an asterism.
• One or more asterisks may be used as censorship over all or part of a word.
• Asterisks are sometimes used as an alternative to typographical bullets to indicate items of a list.
• Asterisks can be used in textual media to represent *emphasis* when bold or italic text is not available.
• Asterisks may denote corrections to misspelling or misstatements in previous electronic messages, particularly when replacement or retraction of a previous writing is not possible, such as with "immediate delivery" messages or "instant messages" that can't be edited. Usually this takes the form of a message consisting solely of the corrected text, with an asterisk placed before to the correction. For example, one might send a message reading "*morning" or "morning*" to correct the misspelling in the message "I had a good ".
• Bounding asterisks as "a kind of self-describing stage direction", as linguist Ben Zimmer has put it. For example, in "Another gas station robbery *sigh*", the writer uses *sigh* to express disappointment.

  Encodings