Steriske

Steriske, commonly referred to in English as an asterisk, is a star-shaped typographic symbol used across writing, printing, computing, and mathematics. It is represented by the character * and appears on many keyboards as Shift+8 in common layouts. In Unicode it is encoded as U+002A and is often written as * in HTML.

The name derives from Greek asteriskos meaning "little star," passing through Latin as asteriscus. The symbol began to appear in early printing in the 15th century and soon served as a reference mark for annotations, notes, and corrections in texts. Over time its range of uses expanded with changes in publishing, computing, and data processing.

Common uses include marking footnotes and editorial notes, indicating omissions or redactions in censored text, and signaling emphasis in plain text where formatting is unavailable. In search and data tasks, the steriske functions as a wildcard character that stands in for one or more characters when matching strings. In mathematics and computing, it serves as the multiplication operator in many programming languages, a pointer or dereference operator in languages such as C, and, in regular expressions, as a quantifier that denotes repetition of the preceding element. The symbol also appears in markup and scripting languages to denote special meanings or to introduce comments in some contexts.

Culturally, asterisks can carry tone or policy signals, such as indicating cautions or exceptions in a notice. For encoding and typography, the steriske is widely supported, with standard representation in code, fonts, and character sets, and a common HTML entity (*) for web content.