I’ve always been fond of asterisks.-Those little stars don’t necessarily do the grunt work of punctuation, like fullstops, commas or questions marks - but they have a range of functions. The word asterisk has been used in English since the late 14th Century, where it was spelt asterich or asterisc. It’s from Late Latin asteriscus, from the earlier Greek asterikos “little star,” diminutive of aster “star” (thanks Etymonline, as always!). Text structuring Read carefully! Free pie* sounds great, until you follow that little asterisk to the bottom of the page where it tells you that you’ll need to buy a pony to get your free pie. The caveat asterisk almost never brings good news. Asterisks can buddy up to distinguish actions from speech in an extended written narrative, mostly in informal web writing (*spends 20 minutes thinking of a good example*), or can be used within a sentence to put *emphasis* on a word. (As a subpoint of this, it drives me crazy in gchat that asterisks around text bold it. To get the right effect you have to use two asterisks, but then it’s bolded *pulls grumpy face* I guess gchat is a dying medium anyway, so maybe I’m the only one who cares.  In the fast-paced world of online chat, or the fumble of autotext on mobiles, misspellings will always creep in. One way to acknowledge your own error is to asterisk the corrected item on the next line: so while you’re typong *typing if you maek a mistake *make you can move on quickly. Wikipedia tells me this correction use of astrisks can also occur at the end of the word you’re correcting, which is a usage I’ve never seen. Grawlix is the use of symbols instead of letters to obscure a swear word. Classy newspapers may use a row of asterisks for motherf***er, while in comics you’re more likely to see mother*%#@er with the asterisk in a salad of symbols. Professional life The asterisk has a range of specific technical jobs as well. I’m sure I don’t know all of them! In linguistics it is used to indicate that a sentence or string is not grammatical in a language: ‘the pink horse ate a pie’ is grammatical but ‘*horse the pink slept a pie’ isn’t. In historical linguistics it can be used to denote a word that is the most likely reconstruction, but we don’t have an example of it being used. For example, we have no written Proto-Indo-European, but scholars have figured out that the word for star was probably *h₂stḗr. It can occasionally step in as the multiplication sign - 2*2=4, and has a range of other uses in mathematics that are beyond my comprehension. It’s also used to indicate if a statistical analysis has significance. In the world of computing and mathematics the asterisk has a professional alias - it’s known as a star, or Kleen star after Stephen Kleen. In this role the star denotes zero or more repetitions of an action. It is also used as a ‘wildcard’ in searches. If you google “eat * and pie” you’ll get any words that occurs in the place where the star is (eat cake and pie, cheese and pie, as well as some messy results like “pie. And pie” because that star is not discerning). Party time But it’s not all hard work for asterisks. They can be used to brighten up your smiley game with a clownish nose for the horizontal folk :*) and dazed eyes for the vertical *_* They’re also a key asset in ~*~::*sparkly unicorn punctuation*::~*~. All this talk of punctuation reminds me that I should check out David Crystal’s Making a Point, about the history of English punctuation.  I’m sure the asterisk has other jobs I’ve neglected to mention. What else does the asterisk get up to?