Origins
The word 'asterisk' entered English in the late fourteenth century from Late Latin 'asteriscus,' which was borrowed from Greek 'asteriskos' (ἀστερίσκος), meaning 'little star.' The Greek word is a diminutive of 'astēr' (ἀστήρ), the standard Greek word for 'star,' formed with the diminutive suffix '-iskos.' The naming is descriptive: the asterisk symbol (*) resembles a small star with radiating points.
The Greek noun 'astēr' derives from the Proto-Indo-European root *h₂stḗr, meaning 'star.' This is one of the most confidently reconstructed PIE words, with reflexes across most branches of the family. Latin 'stella' (from earlier *sterla) gave French 'étoile' and English 'stellar.' The Germanic branch transformed the root into Proto-Germanic *sternō, producing English 'star,' German 'Stern,' Dutch 'ster,' and Swedish 'stjärna.' Armenian 'astł' and Hittite 'ḫasterza' further confirm the reconstruction. The initial *h₂ is a laryngeal consonant that colored the following vowel differently in each daughter language.
The history of the asterisk as a symbol is older than the history of the word in English. The Alexandrian scholar Aristarchus of Samothrace, working in the great Library of Alexandria around 200-150 BCE, used the asterisk (which he called 'asteriskos') as one of several critical marks in his groundbreaking edition of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. He placed an asterisk beside lines that he believed had been duplicated from elsewhere in the text — passages that appeared in two locations, where one was presumably original and the other interpolated. A different mark, the 'obelos' (a horizontal line, ancestor of the modern 'obelus' division sign), indicated lines he considered entirely spurious.
Development
This makes the asterisk one of the oldest typographic symbols still in daily use. The scholars of Alexandria effectively invented textual criticism, and their marginal marks — asterisks, obeli, and other signs — constituted the first systematic apparatus for annotating texts. When medieval scribes copied these editions, they preserved the symbols, and when printing was invented, the asterisk was among the marks that made the transition from manuscript to type.
In modern English, the asterisk serves multiple functions. In publishing, it marks footnotes and annotations. In linguistics, it marks reconstructed forms (like *h₂stḗr above) and, conversely, ungrammatical constructions. In computing, it serves as a wildcard character (matching any string), a multiplication operator, and a pointer dereference operator. In informal digital communication, asterisks placed around a word indicate emphasis or denote an action (*waves*). Each of these uses descends, however distantly, from Aristarchus's original practice of using a little star to draw attention to a particular passage.
The word 'asterisk' belongs to a large family of English words derived from Greek 'astēr.' 'Astronomy' (star-arranging), 'astrology' (star-reasoning), 'astronaut' (star-sailor), 'asteroid' (star-like), 'aster' (the star-shaped flower), and 'disaster' (literally 'bad star,' from the astrological belief that calamities were caused by unfavorable stellar alignments) all trace to the same Greek root.
Greek Origins
A common mispronunciation of 'asterisk' substitutes '-ix' for '-isk,' producing 'asterix.' This error is widespread enough to have been noted by usage commentators for decades. The confusion may be reinforced by the French comic book character Astérix, whose name is indeed derived from the same Greek root but spelled differently. The standard English pronunciation preserves the Greek diminutive suffix clearly: /ˈæs.tə.ɹɪsk/, ending with the 'sk' sound of '-iskos.'