U+002A Asterisk
U+002A was added to Unicode in version 1.1 (1993). It belongs to the block Basic Latin in the Basic Multilingual Plane.
This character is a Other Punctuation and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script. The character is also known as star.
The glyph is not a composition. It has a Narrow East Asian Width. In bidirectional context it acts as Other Neutral and is not mirrored. The glyph can, under circumstances, be confused with 4 other glyphs. In text U+002A behaves as Alphabetic regarding line breaks. It has type Other for sentence and Other for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break is Any.
The CLDR project labels this character “asterisk” for use in screen reading software. It assigns additional tags, e.g. for search in emoji pickers: asterisk, star, wildcard.
This character is designated as an emoji. It will be rendered as monochrome character on conforming platforms. To enable colorful emoji display, you can combine it with Variation Selector-16: *️ See the Emojipedia for more details on this character’s emoji properties.
The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:
The asterisk ( *), from Late Latin asteriscus, from Ancient Greek ἀστερίσκος, asteriskos, "little star", is a typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a heraldic star.
Computer scientists and mathematicians often vocalize it as star (as, for example, in the A* search algorithm or C*-algebra). In English, an asterisk is usually five- or six-pointed in sans-serif typefaces, six-pointed in serif typefaces, and six- or eight-pointed when handwritten. Its most common use is to call out a footnote. It is also often used to censor offensive words.
In computer science, the asterisk is commonly used as a wildcard character, or to denote pointers, repetition, or multiplication.
Representations
| System | Representation |
|---|---|
| Nº | 42 |
| UTF-8 | 2A |
| UTF-16 | 00 2A |
| UTF-32 | 00 00 00 2A |
| URL-Quoted | %2A |
| HTML hex reference | * |
| HTML named entity | * |
| HTML named entity | * |
| alias | star |
| LATEX | \ast |
| AGL: Latin-1 | asterisk |
| AGL: Latin-2 | asterisk |
| AGL: Latin-3 | asterisk |
| AGL: Latin-4 | asterisk |
| AGL: Latin-5 | asterisk |
| Adobe Glyph List | asterisk |
| digraph | * |
Related Characters
Confusables
Elsewhere
Complete Record
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| 1.1 (1993) | |
| ASTERISK | |
| — | |
| Basic Latin | |
| Other Punctuation | |
| Common | |
| Other Neutral | |
| Not Reordered | |
| None | |
| Asterisk | |
| ✘ | |
| Asterisk | |
| Asterisk | |
| ✘ | |
| Asterisk | |
| Asterisk | |
| Asterisk | |
| Asterisk | |
| Asterisk | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✔ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✔ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Asterisk | |
| Any | |
| ✔ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| — | |
| NA | |
| Other | |
| — | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Yes | |
| Yes | |
| Asterisk | |
| Yes | |
| Yes | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✔ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Other | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Other | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| ✘ | |
| Asterisk | |
| None | |
| Narrow | |
| Not Applicable | |
| — | |
| No_Joining_Group | |
| Non Joining | |
| Alphabetic | |
| None | |
| not a number | |
| Asterisk | |
| R |