Asterisk & Octothorpe

On a Touch-Tone telephone keypad, the asterisk (*) (called star, or less commonly, palm or sextile[2]) is one of the two special keys (the other is the number sign (#) (pound sign or hash or, less commonly, octothorp[2])), and is found to the left of the zero.

ASTERISK: as-tə-ˌrisk as·ter·isk
An asterisk (*) is a typographical symbol or glyph. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a star (Latin astrum).

Symbol (*), used to highlight a particular word or sentence, often to indicate a footnote;
sometimes used instead of typographical bullets to indicate items of a list.

Three spaced asterisks ( * * * ) centered on a page may represent a jump to a different scene or thought.

Colloquially, asterisks can be used to represent *emphasis* when italics are not available.

In programs distributed at race tracks, an asterisk next to a jockey's name indicates that he or she is an apprentice, and in many cases is allowed to ride at a slightly lesser weight than the other jockeys. Such a jockey is sometimes called a "bug boy."

In computing: A wildcard symbol.


OCTOTHORPE: octo- + thorp p/ ɒktəʊθɔː
Used in the U.S. and Canada on touch-tone telephones. "Please press the pound key"

The word has appeared in many forms, including octothorn, octalthorp, and octatherp as well as octothorpe. There are at least five stories circulating about its source. Nobody is in any doubt about the first part, which is obviously enough from the Latin (or Greek) word for 'eight', as in 'octagon' for an eight-sided figure, because of the eight points on the symbol. It’s the second half that puzzles the experts.

The American Heritage Dictionary says that it comes from the family name of James Edward Oglethorpe, the eighteenth-century English philanthropist who secured a charter for the colony of Georgia in 1732 as a refuge for unemployed debtors.

A second story says that it is a whimsical creation based on the idea that the symbol looks like a village surrounded by eight fields. 'Thorp' is the Old Norse word for a village, which appears in many English place names, such as 'Scunthorpe' or 'Cleethorpes'.

In the UK and Australia the symbol is often used as medical shorthand for 'fracture'