Asterism

1. n. An optical property of some crystals which exhibit a star-shaped by reflected light, as star sapphire, or by transmitted light, as some mica.
2. n. A constellation.
3. n. A small cluster of stars.
4. n. An asterisk, or mark of reference.
5. n. Three asterisks placed in this manner, /, to direct attention to a particular passage.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.