Dinkus

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A small drawing or artwork used for decoration in a magazine or periodical.
  2. 2
    A small ornament, usually a line of three asterisks (* * *), especially for the purpose of breaking up sections of a chapter, article, or other text.

    "More generally a dinkus is a small ornamentation, usually three asterisks, that break up sections of a book chapter, article or other written text."

Example

More examples

"More generally a dinkus is a small ornamentation, usually three asterisks, that break up sections of a book chapter, article or other written text."

Etymology

From dinky (“tiny and cute”). The word was coined by an artist on the Australian periodical The Bulletin in the 1920s.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.