The real name for a hashtag is octothorpe. That humble little character we’ve all come to know and love – the ones that preceded trending topics and witty one-liners alike – has a secret identity. Meet the octothrope, the mysterious moniker behind the beloved hashtag.
From its obscure origins to its modern-day dominance, we’ll uncover the fascinating story behind this enigmatic symbol and symbol and explore why its true name remains a surprise to so many.
History
It is believed that the symbol traces its origins to the symbol, an abbreviation of the Roman term libra pond, which translates as “pound weight”. The abbreviation “lb” was printed as a dedicated ligature including a horizontal line across (which indicated the abbreviation).
Ultimately, the symbol was reduced for clarity as an overlay of two horizontal strokes “=” across two slash-like strokes “//”.
The symbol is described as the “number” character in an 1853 treatise on bookkeeping. And its double meaning is described in a bookkeeping text from 1880. The instruction manual of the Blickensderfer model 5 typewriter (c. 1896) appears to refer to the symbol as the “number mark”.
Some early-20th-century U.S. sources refer to it as the “number sign”. Although this could also refer to the numero sign (№). A 1917 manual distinguishes between two uses of the sign: “number (written before a figure)” and “pounds (written after a figure)”.
The use of the phrase “pound sign” to refer to this symbol is found from 1932 in U.S. usage. The term hash sign is found in South African writings from the late 1960s and other non-North-American sources in the 1970s.
The Symbol became available on Computers
For mechanical devices, the symbol appeared on the keyboard of the Remington Standard typewriter (c. 1886). It appeared in many of the early teleprinter codes and from there was copied to ASCII. It became available on computers and thus caused many more uses to be found for the character.
The symbol was introduced on the bottom right button of touch-tone keypads in 1968. But that button was not extensively used until the advent of large-scale voicemail (PBX systems, etc.) in the early 1980s.
One of the uses of computers was to label the following text as having a different interpretation (such as a command or a comment) from the rest of the text. It was adopted for use within Internet relay chat (IRC) networks circa 1988 to label groups and topics.
This usage inspired Chris Messina to propose a similar system to be used on Twitter to tag topics of interest on the microblogging network; This became known as a hashtag. Although used initially and most popularly on Twitter, hashtag use has extended to other social media sites.
Names
Number sign
“Number sign” is the name chosen by the Unicode consortium. Most common in Canada and the northeastern United States. American telephone equipment companies that serve Canadian callers often have an option in their programming to denote Canadian English, which in turn instructs the system to say number signs to callers instead of the pound.
Pound sign or pound
In the United States, the “#” key on a phone is commonly referred to as the pound sign, pound key, or simply pound. Dialing instructions to an extension such as #77, for example, can be read as “pound seven seven”. This name is rarely used outside the United States, where the term pound sign is understood to mean the currency symbol £.
Hash, hash mark, hashmark
In the United Kingdom, Australia, and some other countries, it is generally called a “hash” (probably from “hatch”, referring to cross-hatching.
Programmers also use this term; for instance #! is “hash, bang” or “shebang”.
Hashtag
Derived from the previous, the word “hashtag” is often used when reading social media messages aloud, indicating the start of a hashtag. For instance, the text “#foo” is often read out loud as “hashtag foo” (as opposed to “hash foo”). This leads to the common belief that the symbol itself is called a hashtag. Twitter documentation refers to it as “the hashtag symbol”.
Hex
“Hex” is commonly used in Singapore and Malaysia, as spoken by many recorded telephone directory-assistance menus: “Please enter your phone number followed by the ‘hex’ key”. The term “hex” is discouraged in Singapore in favor of “hash”. In Singapore, a hash is also called “hex” in apartment addresses, where it precedes the floor number.
Octothorp
Most scholars believe the word was invented by workers at the Bell Telephone Laboratories by 1968, who needed a word for the symbol on the telephone keypad. Don MacPherson is said to have created the word by combining octo and the last name of Jim Thorpe, an Olympic medalist.
Howard Eby and Lauren Asplund claim to have invented the word as a joke in 1964. Combining octo with the syllable therp which, because of the “th” digraph, was hard to pronounce in different languages.
The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, 1991, has a long article that is consistent with Doug Kerr’s essay. It says “octotherp” was the original spelling. It also said that the word arose in the 1960s among telephone engineers as a joke.
Other hypotheses for the origin of the word include the last name of James Oglethorpe. Or using the Old English word for village, thorp because the symbol looks like a village surrounded by eight fields. The word was popularized within and outside Bell Labs.
The first appearance of “octothorp” in a US patent is in a 1973 filing. This patent also refers to the six-pointed asterisk (✻) used on telephone buttons as a “sextile”.
Sharp
The use of the name “sharp” is due to the symbol’s resemblance to the U+266F ♯ MUSIC SHARP SIGN. The same derivation is seen in the name of the Microsoft programming languages C#, J#, and F#.
Microsoft says that the name C# is pronounced ‘see sharp’. “According to the ECMA-334 C# Language Specification, the name of the language is written “C#” (“LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C (U+0043) followed by the NUMBER SIGN # (U+0023)”) and pronounced, “C Sharp”.
