In grammar, an asterisk refers to a symbol commonly used to relate footnotes into a text or mark certain words. But besides the asterisk is used as a wildcard or wildcard character, which means the use of asterisk replaces a letter or set of letters, this can be found on online web pages or sources rather than on printed sources and example of this is that in search engines you can type the word "pen*" and the asterisk would make results broader and include words such as pencil, penthouse, pent, etc. as the asterisk is whos to mark one or more letters that are not given. Thus, the term for an asterisk being used to replace a letter or group of letters is a wildcard.
