What does *~ do in a .gitignore file?

Question

I just ran across a gitignore file that ends with the line *~ but I have not been able to find a description of what this does.

Answer 1

It ignores all files whose name ends in ~, which is a usual suffix for text editors backup files.

* is a special symbol and means "any sequence of zero or more characters", while ~ is just an ordinary character. Putting the two parts together: "zero or more characters followed by a ~".