splat

n.

  1. Name used in many places (DEC, IBM, and others) for the asterisk (*) character (ASCII 0101010). This may derive from the ‘squashed-bug’ appearance of the asterisk on many early line printers.

  2. [MIT] Name used by some people for the # character (ASCII 0100011).

  3. The feature key on a Mac (same as alt, sense 2).

  4. obs. Name used by some people for the Stanford/ITS extended ASCII ⊗ character. This character is also called blobby and frob, among other names; it is sometimes used by mathematicians as a notation for tensor product.

  5. obs. Name for the semi-mythical Stanford extended ASCII ⊕ character. See also ASCII.