I saw an AI image of an ampersand made of meat, and wanting to play with the concept tried for an asterisk made of meat. I discovered that Bing/Dall-E 3 seems to exclusively imagine an asterisk as having five points, which led me down a rabbit hole.
In my mental image, an asterisk has six points, like the title card for MASH
or the famous (in same circles) Hugo Awards asterisk of 2015
or the aqueous asterisk of Armenia
Google Image Search shows a mix of 5- and 6-pointed asterisks, with 6 points seeming to be dominant (at least a couple of images have 8 points) but the font I’m using on my phone as I write this has a 5-pointed asterisk, and the emoji on my phone are the choice between a 5-pointer and an 8-pointer.
So, what’s your mental image of an asterisk? I’m sure you’ve given this much thought before and have a solid opinion on the topic.
The asterisk I write has six arms because that is easier to draw by hand (three strokes) than five (five strokes). I haven’t really thought about how the come out when typed. * That appears to have five but the one on the keyboard itself has six.
By hand, I’m a six-point man, for the reasons Troutman and Richad_Pearse lay out. It also looks best to me, because something in my brain wants the symmetry. My keyboard has a 5 pointer printed, and that’s what shows up here in Chrome, but Notepad does 6 (Windows 11), and so does LibreOffice. So one computer, 50/50 expression so far. I’ll note that Wiktionary uses 5 as their default (6 is listed), and Wikipedia uses the five pointer in their symbology chunk, but a 6 pointer as the default illustration. And it goes into a HUGE number of Unicode asterisk options.
I must stop going down the rabbit hole. This sort of thing is dangerous!
My asterisk key on my keyboard has five. Can’t remember the last time I created one by hand, but I don’t recall a particular amount any time I created one.
Definitely 6. 5 is a star. (Asterisk is my go-to “special character” for pain in the ass passwords. So I write them often on notes to remember the passwords!)
By the way, the mentions of "X"s above reminds me of one of the most common mispronunciations I encounter - astericks. Used to annoy me, but I’ve heard it so frequently, it is almost to the level of nucular.
8 arms when I write it myself. Like someone else said, it’s an X on a cross. 6 arms on my PC keyboard, which variously appears with 5 or 6 arms depending on application. 5 on my phone keyboard and in this comment box.
I guess 8 arms would look cluttered when represented with pixels. Maybe that’s also the reason for the preference for 5 arms on screens?
I would not have recognised the generated images as asterisks, they look like stars. Asterisks should have arms that are of equal-ish width, not ones that are triangular.
I’m actually getting into a bit of a rabbit hole myself looking at the asterisks of various fonts. I used to be a graphic designer, and choosing the right font or recognizing fonts in order to match them was a big part of the job. But I’ve never considered the simple asterisk on its own.
I enlarged an asterisk to 200 points in Word, and running down the font list automatically changes the asterisk. Some observations:
Arial and Calibri, probably the two most used sans-serif fonts, look pretty similar but Arial’s asterisk has 5 points, and Calibri has 6.
Adobe Devanagari (no idea where I picked that font up) has an otherwise unrmarkable 5-point asterisk, but it’s tilted at about a 12 degree angle (like the Earth!).
Bauhaus 93’s asterisk is a 5 point star, almost like on the American flag, but with the points having a curve to them, so it looks like a ninja throwing star.
Bell MT and Bradley Hand ITC have 8-point asterisks, among a small handful of 8-pointers I’ve found so far.
Copperplate Gothic’s asterisk is a 5-pointer with heavy-duty serifs on each point, so it looks very cool and Gothic.
Goudy Stout has probably the most unique asterisk I’ve seen so far-- it’s a diamond shape in a windowpane formation, with 4 smaller diamonds separated by a small spacing, like the Windows logo turned to a 90 degree angle.
So it is kind of a fascinating (to me, at least ) what a variety of asterisk styles exist, and that’s only getting to the ‘Gs’. Some otherwise ornate fonts just have plain asterisks, while with other fonts it’s clear the designer put a lot of thought into the asterisk.
) what a variety of asterisk styles exist, and that’s only getting to the ‘Gs’. Some otherwise ornate fonts just have plain asterisks, while with other fonts it’s clear the designer put a lot of thought into the asterisk.