etymology - What is a thorpe?


# is an octothorpe


* is a hexathorpe


+ a quadrathorpe


- a duothorpe


but What is a thorpe???


This question came from an argument in comments on stackoverflow that started over an American calling a # a pound sign.



Answer



Thorpe


The -thorpe comes from octothorpe. Its origins are unknown. The other words are rare and likely variations after octothorpe.


Octothorpe


The OED says of octothorpe:



The term was reportedly coined in the early 1960s by Don Macpherson, an employee of Bell Laboratories:



1996 Telecom Heritage No. 28. 53 His thought process was as follows: There are eight points on the symbol so octo should be part of the name. We need a few more letters or another syllable to make a noun... (Don Macpherson..was active in a group that was trying to get Jim Thorpe's Olympic medals returned from Sweden). The phrase thorpe would be unique.



For an alternative explanation see quot. 1996; in a variant of this explanation, the word is explained as arising from the use of the symbol in cartography to represent a village.


For a different explanation from a former employee of Bell Laboratories, arguing that the word is a completely arbitrary formation (and that it originally had the form octatherp) see D. A. Kerr ‘The ASCII Character Octatherp’ in http://doug.kerr.home.att.net (2006).



Quot. 1996 is:



1996 New Scientist 30 Mar. 54/3 The term ‘octothorp(e)’ (which MWCD10 dates 1971) was invented for ‘#’, allegedly by Bell Labs engineers when touch-tone telephones were introduced in the mid-1960s. ‘Octo-’ means eight, and ‘thorp’ was an Old English word for village: apparently the sign was playfully construed as eight fields surrounding a village.



Hexathorpe, quadrathorpe and duothorpe


Hexathorpe, quadrathorpe and duothorpe don't appear in the OED and I suspect they're variations after octothorpe. They also don't figure in this Google Ngrams chart and a quick search of Usenet shows they're usually mentioned in reference to the octothorpe.


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