Asterisk

Group: Punctuation

Keywords

punctuation

About this character

Asterisk belongs to the Punctuation group and is encoded at U+002A. It was added in Unicode 0.0.

Shortcode

Chat apps such as Slack, Discord and GitHub accept this shortcode instead of the character itself.

Technical codes

Code point: U+002A
Hex: 002A
Decimal: 42
HTML: *
CSS: \2A
JavaScript: \u002A
Python: \u002A
UTF-8: 2A

The same character is drawn differently by each operating system and font.

Hyphen U+2010
Non-Breaking Hyphen U+2011
Figure Dash U+2012
En Dash U+2013
Em Dash U+2014
Horizontal Bar U+2015
Double Vertical Line U+2016
Double Low Line U+2017
Left Single Quotation Mark U+2018
Right Single Quotation Mark U+2019
Single Low-9 Quotation Mark U+201A
Single High-Reversed-9 Quotation Mark U+201B
Left Double Quotation Mark U+201C
Right Double Quotation Mark U+201D
Double Low-9 Quotation Mark U+201E
Double High-Reversed-9 Quotation Mark U+201F
Dagger U+2020
Double Dagger U+2021
Bullet U+2022
Triangular Bullet U+2023
One Dot Leader U+2024
Two Dot Leader U+2025
Horizontal Ellipsis U+2026
Hyphenation Point U+2027

Questions

Why does this emoji look different on my phone?

Unicode standardises the meaning of a character, not its drawing. Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung each ship their own artwork, so the same code point changes shape between devices.

Does copying work everywhere?

The character is copied as plain text, so it pastes into any app that accepts text. If the receiving app has no font for it, you will see an empty box instead.