Asterix, Asterics, Asterik, and More: The Story Behind the Name of Asterisk

“Asterisk” is one of the most commonly misspelled words in the English dictionary.  Some of the more common misspellings consist of “Asterix,” “Asterics” and “Astericks”; however some accounts of the more severe “Astrixs” do exist on the web.  In fact, Googling “Asterix” in search of  Asterisk telephony related material will leave some people scratching their heads as information about the famous French cartoon character “Asterix the Gaul” populates the screen.

Since “Asterisk” is so difficult for us—many of which are highly dependent on spell-check already—to spell; it begs the question why Mark Spencer, original creator of the open source PBX, named his program such a tricky word.  In order to get to the bottom of it, we decided to contact Mr. Spencer to get the official reason in his own words.  As you might expect, the answer is simple yet well designed:

“[I named the software Asterisk] because of the UNIX wildcard symbol meaning ‘everything’ like ‘rm -rf *’ and I wanted Asterisk to be everything for telecom!”

So it turns out that Mark wasn’t actually just trying to teach us how to spell a difficult word, instead it appears that he simply has a knack for coming up with interesting and strangely appropriate name concepts.  So next time you start typing the words “Asterix pbx” into Google, just remember that Asterisk’s name comes from UNIX, not from a Gaul.