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The asterisk is a symbol used in typographic. It gets its name from the fact that it resembles a traditional depiction of a star.

It is frequently referred to as star by computer scientists and mathematicians (as in the AAsterisk PNG search algorithm or CAsterisk PNG-algebra, for example). An asterisk is typically five points in sans-serif fonts, six points in serif typefaces, and six or eight points when handwritten in English. Its most typical application is to bring attention to a footnote. It’s also commonly used to block inappropriate terms and to make a correction to a prior communication on the Internet.

In ice age cave art, the asterisk has previously been employed as a sign. Aristarchus of Samothrace employed a two-thousand-year-old symbol known as the asteriskos to highlight lines that were duplicated in Homeric poetry when editing it. Origen is also known to have used asteriskos to indicate missing Hebrew lines in his Hexapla. The asterisk changed shape over time, but its purpose as a symbol for flaw correction remained the same.

The asterisk was commonly employed in the Middle Ages to emphasize a specific area of text, typically relating that part of the text to a marginal note. An asterisk, on the other hand, was not always utilized.

One theory for the origin of the asterisk is that it is derived from the 5000-year-old Sumerian character dingir, albeit this theory appears to be purely visual.

During the 1961 baseball season, when Roger Maris of the New York Yankees was on the verge of breaking Babe Ruth’s 34-year-old single-season home run record, the word was first used in sports. Ruth hit 60 home runs in just 154 games, but Maris was playing in the American League’s newly enlarged 162-game season for the first time.

Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick, a friend of Ruth’s during his lifetime, held a press conference to announce his “ruling” that if Maris took longer than 154 games, both records would be recognized by Major League Baseball, but that Maris’ achievement should be listed alongside Ruth’s in the “record books” with some “distinctive mark.”

Not Frick, but New York Daily News journalist Dick Young proposed the asterisk as a mark at the time. The truth was that MLB didn’t have direct authority over any record books until many years later, and it was all just a proposal from Frick. Within a few years, the debate had gone down, and Maris was named as the single-season record holder by all major baseball record keepers.

Despite this, Maris had the stigma of having a tainted record for many years, and the notion of an asterisk designating less-than-accepted “official” records has become commonplace in sports and other competitive activities. In allusion to the issue, a 2001 TV movie about Maris’s record-breaking season was titled 61Asterisk PNG (pronounced “sixty-one asterisk”).

The debate about the legitimacy of baseball records and whether or not criteria should be added to them erupted anew in the late 1990s, when Maris’ record was shattered by a steroid-fueled power surge. Despite the fact that Mark McGwire’s use of steroids was clear – and subsequently confirmed – when he hit 70 home runs in 1998, ruling authorities did nothing, to to the chagrin of many fans and sportswriters. Three years later, self-admitted steroid user Barry Bonds upped the record to 73, prompting fans to demand another asterisk in the record books.

During the 2007 season, when Bonds neared and eventually shattered Hank Aaron’s career home run record of 755, fans were very vocal and demanded that baseball intervene.

Fans outraged by what they saw to be unduly mild sanctions against the Astros players called the club the “Houston Asterisks” after an MLB investigation uncovered the team’s involvement in a sign-stealing scheme during the 2017 season, during which they won the World Series.

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