Studying stars is one of the oldest of the sciences. Humans have stared at the night sky from and tried to understand their meaning from before prehistory. Indeed it is believed the word “star” is one of the earliest words ever used along with words for mother and father.
But I am concerned not with the stars in the sky but with the stars on our page. Among all the punctuation marks that we use or misuse in our writing (and have trained AI to use badly) one that we probably take the most for granted is the asterisk.
Meaning of asterisk
The word asterisk comes from Latin “asteriscus” from Greek “asteriskos” both meaning “little star.” It’s a diminutive (i.e. a word denoting a smaller version of something) of “aster” for star. That makes “asterisk” a cousin of astronomy, astrology and asteroid.
From scrolls to screens
The asterisk is a little enigmatic in its proper use because it has moved from being a printer’s assistant to being an operator in the digital age.
Its shape—a starburst of six points—was first used by the ancient Greek scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium (c 257 to c185 BC) to mark duplicate lines in poetry. Aristophanes was an expert on Homer and he also invented the comma.
The asterisk later became a printer’s tool for noting omissions or adding footnotes. It signalled an annotation, a detail, or a disclaimer. It is still used but has been superceded by numerical footnoting.
Asterisked disclaimer
The concept of being a disclaimer has emerged in American English when they say something has been “asterisked”. Thus asterisk become a verb. It’s a subtle way of saying that something is not quite as impressive as it seems. For instance, a world record athletic achievement might be “asterisked” if it was set at high altitude. An election landslide might be “asterisked” if the opposition policies made them unelectable. Being asterisked says the achievement is real—but there is more to it. An achievement that does not need to be explained is therefore “asteriskless”.
The asterisk was also used by printers to mark of unknown letters in transcriptions. From this it became used to soften swear words by thinly disguising words so that they would not offend people, such as sh*t.
In computer language the asterisk is used to mean multiplication: 3 * 4 = 12. It was also used to represent a universal or wildcard character. If you type in “doc*” as a search function it will find “document”, “doctor”, or “doctrine”.
Endnote on the asterisk
I know we all take the asterisk for granted but it is a versatile tool in our punctuation toolbox. This ancient typographical glyph, textual footnoter, expletive disguiser and modern mathematical operator really is a little star.