What is the symbol * called on the keyboard? Option 2: Press and hold the SHIFT key and then press 8.Option 1: Press and hold the ALT key and then type 42.If you are on Windows, the asterisk can be written like this: However, this only works if you s witch the input method to Unicode hex input first. If you are on a German-Layout keyboard, type Shift + Exclamation mark (!)Īlternatively, you can also produce an asterisk by holding down the ALT key and then type 002a. If you are using a US-Layout keyboard, type Shift + 8 to produce the asterisk. If you would like to use the asterisk symbol in your text as a wildcard symbol, math symbol or who knows who for what purpose, here is how you do it: How do you type the asterisk symbol on your keyboard? * In Pinyin, the official romanization system for Standard Chinese, 之 is written as “zhī.” This text is all about the meaning of 之* in the Chinese language. The additional info usually figures at the end of the text/paragraph/section. In many cases, the asterisk symbol is simply used to give additional info about (a) certain word(s) in the text. The asterisk symbol as an annotator for additional info Your search query then looks like this: Best food for * cats.Īs a content creator or website builder, this is indeed very helpful because it provides you with many new content ideas. But to make things more interesting, you can spice this up a little bit, by inserting a wild card between for and cats:
Well, you will certainly find some good search results like that. To find out what people are interested in, you could simply go to and then there type in best food for cats.
Let’s say you are a cat lover and you would like to build a website about cats, where you provide information about everything cat-related. If you are planning to build your own website, for instance, you can use the asterisk to your favor t o find out what people are looking for in your niche. Google’s search engine lets you use the asterisk as a wildcard when typing in keywords in their search engine. A wildcard is some kind of a placeholder that can be filled with different parameters, depending on the software.
#Why do i have to hold shift to use math symbols on keyboard software#
In different software applications, the asterisk is used as a wildcard symbol. In some computational languages such as in the Wolfram Language and Fortran, a double star symbol (**) also serves some purposes.
As a superscript, the asterisk symbol (here it is called A-star) refers to the A* search algorithm.To denote multiplication, such as in 4 * 4 (same as 4 x 4).The asterisk is serving different purposes in Math: In any kind of text, the asterisk can be used to provide additional information about (a) specific word(s) of the text. In software applications, the asterisk is often used as a wildcard symbol. In Math, for instance, the asterisk symbol is used for multiplication of two numbers, let’s say 4 * 5 in this case, the asterisk is voiced ‘times,’ making it “4 times 5”. Depending on the context, the asterisk symbol has different meanings. In English, the symbol * is generally called asterisk. What is the little star symbol (*) called?