Asterisk keycap

It points to the phone's star button or acts as a bold asterisk. In practical messages—such as customer-support guides, office intercom notes, or mobile carrier tips—it literally means the * key on your dial pad. Writing “Press *️⃣ then 0️⃣” makes the button stand out clearly from the surrounding words.

Outside of phone instructions, writers borrow it whenever a plain * feels too small to notice. On social media and in group chats, you will see it flagging a joking fine-print disclaimer at the bottom of a post, marking an important note in an announcement, or standing in for a vowel to soften a profanity without triggering plain-text word filters.

Why do phones have a star key in the first place?

Engineers added it in the 1960s to give touch-tone phones command keys. When push-button telephones replaced rotary dials, designers at Bell Labs arranged the ten digits in a three-by-three grid with 0 at the bottom center. That left two empty corners on the bottom row, which they filled with two standard typewriter marks: the asterisk (*) on the left and the hash (#) on the right.

Unlike the numbers, those two buttons were meant for talking to telephone switches and computers rather than dialing a person. Today the international keypad standard (ITU-T E.161) keeps in that exact bottom-left spot worldwide. In automated voice menus, #️⃣ usually confirms an entry or moves forward, while ️⃣ typically cancels, goes back a step, or repeats the options—and on mobile networks, dialing codes that start with * still check balances or change call settings.