Small Asterisk
Copy and paste the small asterisk symbol ﹡ (U+FE61) instantly. Part of the Small Form Variants Unicode block.
Works everywhere: websites, documents, social media, code editors
Character Codes
About This Symbol
- Name
- Small Asterisk
- Unicode Block
- Small Form Variants
- Code Point
- U+FE61
The Small Asterisk (﹡) is a Unicode character assigned to the Small Form Variants block at code point U+FE61. This block contains characters used across a variety of applications including technical documentation, web development, mathematical notation, and everyday digital communication. The small asterisk symbol can be inserted directly into text or referenced through its HTML entity, CSS code, or JavaScript escape sequence for use in websites and applications.
How to Use
- 1.Click "Copy Symbol" above to copy ﹡ to your clipboard
- 2.Paste it anywhere with Ctrl+V (or Cmd+V on Mac)
- 3.Or use the HTML entity
﹡in your code - 4.For CSS, use
\FE61with the content property
Understanding Small Asterisk
Assigned to code point U+FE61, the small asterisk (﹡) serves a precise role within the Small Form Variants block. Unlike generic approximations, this dedicated Unicode entry ensures that software can distinguish it from other characters and render it with consistent intent across browsers, operating systems, and fonts.
The hexadecimal value FE61 places this character at decimal position 65121 in the Unicode table. At this position, the character falls 1 positions past the nearest hex boundary, a detail relevant for font engineers mapping glyph tables. For practical use, ﹡ in HTML or \u{FE61} in JavaScript are the most common insertion methods.
Known by its descriptive name referencing "small asterisk," this character serves a specific role that generic symbols cannot fill. It appears in specialized typography, technical standards, and digital content where precision in symbol choice directly affects meaning or layout.
About Punctuation & Typography
Punctuation and typographic symbols govern the rhythm, structure, and precision of written language. Far beyond periods and commas, Unicode encodes em dashes, en dashes, figure dashes, hair spaces, thin spaces, non-breaking spaces, and a wealth of specialized marks that professional typographers demand. Combining diacritical marks, superscripts, subscripts, and letterlike symbols round out a toolkit that bridges the gap between plain text and polished publication.
Ancient texts ran words together without spaces or punctuation — a practice called scriptio continua. Aristophanes of Byzantium introduced rudimentary punctuation marks in the 3rd century BCE, but systematic punctuation did not emerge until medieval scribes developed marks to guide reading aloud in monasteries. The printing press standardized punctuation across languages, though conventions diverged — Spanish adopted inverted question marks, French added spaces before colons, and German quotation marks took a distinctive low-high form. Unicode encodes all these traditions, plus typographic refinements like the interrobang (‽) and various mathematical and linguistic combining marks.
Common Uses
- •Professional typesetting and desktop publishing
- •Academic formatting with proper dash usage and quotation styles
- •Chemical and mathematical formulas using superscripts and subscripts
- •Legal documents requiring precise typographic conventions
- •Multilingual text with language-specific punctuation rules
Technical Notes: The distinction between similar-looking punctuation characters matters enormously. A hyphen-minus (U+002D), an en dash (U+2013), an em dash (U+2014), a minus sign (U+2212), and a figure dash (U+2012) are five different characters with distinct semantic and typographic purposes. Unicode's various space characters — from zero-width space to em space — provide fine-grained control over text layout. Combining diacritical marks can stack multiple marks on a single base character, which stresses rendering engines and can be exploited for text that extends absurdly above or below the baseline (so-called Zalgo text).
Cultural Context: Punctuation conventions reveal deep cultural attitudes toward communication. Japanese uses a distinct set of punctuation marks — 。for periods, 「」for quotation marks — that occupy full character widths. The Oxford comma sparks passionate debate in English. Interestingly, the rise of digital communication has spawned new punctuation norms: the period at the end of a text message now conveys formality or passive aggression to many younger users, a meaning it never carried in print.