Sextile

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

⚹
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

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 a 1973 US patent filing (3,920,926). ^[2] Early prototypes of the touch-tone telephone used keys with a star and diamond shape. According to Bell engineer Doug Kerr, these were replaced with the sextile and hashtag because those could be typed or approximated with the ASCII character set or an office typewriter. ^[3]

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 November 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]"
3. Losh, Elizabeth (19 September 2019). Hashtag. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. pp. 12–15. ISBN   978-1-5013-4428-2.