If you start the text with five asterisks, and then end the text with five asterisks, you'll get super bold text, like this one.
Pretty cool, right? Yeah this one is weird.
Syntax:
*****(insert some text here) *****
No spaces between the five-asterisk thing and the text.
lol i placed 33 asterisks and made ultra super ultimately luxuriously legendary bold text
*uh*
***uh***
*******uh*******
uh
uh
uh
If there are 4 asterisks,munch them and make text super bold
If there are 2 asterisks,munch them and make text bold
If there is one asterisk,munch them and make text slanty
Basically a binary flag system
What happens on 8?
It's just interpreted as 2 toobolds and nothing new is produced
Lets say that you make a new command that flips bits using butterfly flaps.
You might want to customize whether you want to make a butterfly or accept an external butterfly,or whether you want to flip bits in the RAM or in the hard drive.
Your customers are happy with the commands(mbutterfly -externalbutterfly -harddrive)
But then you try to make another option for either forming lens in the ozone layer or in the clouds.
Your customers now have to type a lot of things and get angry.
What you should do is to assign a value to each option(making butterflies score 4,flipping ram bits score 2,and making lens in the ozone layer scores 1,every alternate tion scores nothing) and then give it as a single argument to the command
if you make the scores 3 2 1 instead of 4 2 1 then people would get a new butterfly flipping hard drives and refracting in clouds,instead of using old butterflies flipping ram and refracting in ozone layer
That's bold italic. Two asterisks for italics and three more for boldface.
i dont think so
Weird. In Google Fonts, when I filter the fonts to the boldest ones possible, I only get 7 fonts, and all ofthem have 1 style, none of them are even slant: Browse Fonts - Google Fonts
Well, okay, I'm not a markup expert. What I do know is that bold italic type is a combination of boldface and italics. But you're right, it only takes three of them to make bold italics. I don't believe bold italics are any bolder than boldface, although there are font families that have degrees of bolding.
Here's the boldest italic font: Sonsie One - Google Fonts
By the way, I used 21 asterisks so most computers will have BLACK, EXTREMELY BOLD text
there is a superbold here i think
uh
*uh*
**uh**
***uh***
****uh****
*****uh*****
******uh******
*******uh*******
uh
uh
uh
uh
uh
uh
uh
uh
nope that would be 5 toobolds and one slanty
and you can only get one effect of a type working at once so its equivalent to 5 asterisks
Nope, the boldface ones are all equally heavy., to my eye.
If it looks different on your computer, post a screenshot.
I don't think Helvetica supports this. It works for Windows. 
Weird. When I look at the strong element, the CSS applied is:
strong {
font-weight: bold;
}
But applying bold in CSS sticks 700. Why this can create 900 for me?
Here's what I see:
I suspect your browser is rendering differently from mine; that's why I asked for a screenshot, so I can see what you're seeing.
it has no difference from this one
these are all font weights and part of the fonts, every even number is bolder and odd numbers are italic versions of the previous
abc
**abc**
****abc****
******abc******
********abc********
some fonts have extra bold, some don't
i doubt any common fonts would have anything past 8, definetly not anywhere near 21 unless you get a font specifically for a ridiculous amount of font weights
many fonts also have lighter font weights but i don't think the forum has that
if you want extra bold text change your browser fonts in the settings and maybe install different fonts
don't expect people to start installing different fonts just to distinguish various bolds
tldr:if you use a font weight support font and use white mode you can see the difference
while <big><small> tags are universal