Sextile

⚹
Sextile
In  Unicode	U+26B9⚹SEXTILE
Different from
Different from	U+002A*ASTERISK
Related
See also	U+26BA⚺SEMISEXTILE U+FF0A＊FULLWIDTH ASTERISK U+1F7B5🞵LIGHT SIX SPOKED ASTERISK

This article is about the symbol and its uses. For American post-punk band, see Sextile (band).

The sextile is an aspect in Astrology, a symbol to represent that aspect, and a typographical symbol used in telephony. The symbol represents the radii of a hexagon.

Astrology

Sextile astrological symbol, E.161 "figure 2"

In astrology, a sextile aspect is one of 60º, which is 1⁄6 of the 360° ecliptic or 1⁄2 a trine (120°). Depending on the involved planets, an orb of 4-5° is allowed.

Other uses

The more notable of the other uses of the symbol are as a star key on a telephone keypad ^[1] and on a Viewdata keyboard. This usage first appeared in 1973 US patent filing (3,920,926). ^[2]

See also

• French Republican calendar, in which a leap year was called sextile
• Star (grapheme) § Six points

References

1. Telecommunications Standardization Sector of ITU. "Arrangement of digits, letters and symbols on telephones and other devices that can be used for gaining access to a telephone network". International Telecommunication Union. 3.2.2 Symbols. On the 4 × 3 array, the symbol on the button [...] should have a shape easily identified as the general shape shown in Figure 2. [...] The symbol will be known as the star or the equivalent term in other languages.
2. USpatent 3920926,George Victor Lenaerts&Eric Egils Auzins,"TELEPHONE DATA SET INCLUDING VISUAL DISPLAY MEANS",issued Novemnber 18, 1975, assigned to Northern Electric Company Ltd, Montreal, Canada  "The pad 1 provides keys for numerals 0 to 9, while the sextile or asterisk ( * ) key is decoded to provide a decimal point and the octothorp ( # ) key generates a command [etc]"