From Greek 'asteriskos' (little star) — the symbol was invented by Aristarchus around 200 BCE to mark suspect lines in Homer.
A star-shaped typographic symbol (*) used as a reference mark, to indicate an omission, or to denote a hypothetical or reconstructed linguistic form.
From Late Latin 'asteriscus,' from Greek 'asteriskos' (ἀστερίσκος, a little star), diminutive of 'astēr' (ἀστήρ, star), from PIE *h₂stḗr (star), one of the most stable and well-attested reconstructed forms in historical linguistics — the word for 'star' has remained recognizable for over six thousand years across the Indo-European family. The asterisk symbol (*) was invented by the Alexandrian scholar Aristarchus of Samothrace in the second century BCE to mark passages in Homer that he considered spurious or displaced. In modern historical linguistics, the asterisk took on a second scholarly life: it marks reconstructed forms that are
The asterisk was invented by the scholar Aristarchus of Samothrace around 200 BCE as a critical editing mark for his edition of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey — he placed asterisks next to lines he believed were not written by Homer, making it one of the oldest typographic symbols still in active use today.