Words & WritingGreek → English
Asterisk
/ˈæstərɪsk/noun
The star-shaped mark used to flag a footnote, an omission or a qualification.
The Greek roots
ἀστερίσκος
asterískos
little star
Literally: “little star”
Follow a root:ἀστερίσκος1 word
The story of the word
A little star, the diminutive of astḗr. Alexandrian scholars put it in the margins of Homer to flag a line they suspected of being wrongly repeated, and Origen used it in his six-column Bible to mark words present in Hebrew but missing from the Greek. The mark has meant the same thing for two thousand years: something here needs qualifying. That is exactly what people mean by an asterisk next to a sporting record.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Late Latin → English
- First recorded
- 15th century
Same family
astronomyasteroidastronautdisaster
In a sentence
Every price on the page carried an asterisk and the asterisk carried the truth.
Linguists put an asterisk before a form nobody ever wrote down.