Asterisk
The asterisk (/ˈæstərɪsk/ *), from Late Latin asteriscus, from Ancient Greek ἀστερίσκος, asteriskos, "little star",[1][2] is a typographical symbol.
An asterisk is usually five- or six-pointed in print and six- or eight-pointed when handwritten, though more complex forms exist.
[4] There is also a two-thousand-year-old character used by Aristarchus of Samothrace called the asteriskos, ※, which he used when proofreading Homeric poetry to mark lines that were duplicated.
[12] 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.
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][13] be placed next to Maris', which should be listed alongside Ruth's achievement in the "record books".
[13] The reality, however, was that MLB actually had no direct control over any record books until many years later, and it all was merely a suggestion on Frick's part.
Even though it was obvious - and later admitted[14] - 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.
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.
[15] 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".
The asterisk was a supported symbol on the IBM 026 Keypunch (introduced in 1949 and used to create punch cards with data for early computer systems).
For modern languages, it may be placed before posited problematic word forms, phrases or sentences to flag that they are hypothetical, ungrammatical, unpronounceable, etc.
[30]: 334 By analogy with its use in historical linguistics, the asterisk was variously prepended to "hypothetical" or "unattested" elements in modern language.
[30]: 330 Linguist Fred Householder claims some credit,[32]: 365 [30]: 331 but Giorgio Graffi argues that using an asterisk for this purpose predates his works.
[42][43] See this example from W. Perrett's 1921 transcription of Gottfried Keller's Das Fähnlein der sieben Aufrechten:[44] This convention is no longer usual.
[citation needed] It should be used for a large asterisk that lines up with the other mathematical operators, sitting on the math centerline rather than on the text baseline.
In many scientific publications, the asterisk is employed as a shorthand to denote the statistical significance of results when testing hypotheses.
The reason there are so many is chiefly because of the controversial[citation needed] decision to include in Unicode the entire Zapf Dingbats symbol font.
