word choice - What Is the Real Name of the #?


I used to say "sharp sign" to refer to the # sign.


Today a friend told me that the correct term is number sign or hash sign or even just hash.


What is the difference between these options and what's the correct usage of the names for this sign?



Answer




Hashtag
Wikipedia


The use of the hash symbol in IRC inspired Chris Messina to propose a similar system to be used on Twitter to tag topics of interest on the microblogging network. He posted the first hashtag on Twitter:



“how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?" —Chris Messina, ("factoryjoe"), August 23, 2007




enter image description here



The first use of the term "hash tag" was in a blog post by Stowe Boyd, "Hash Tags = Twitter Groupings," on 26 August 2007, according to lexicographer Ben Zimmer, chair of the American Dialect Society's New Words Committee.


Beginning July 2, 2009,Twitter began to hyperlink all hashtags in tweets to Twitter search results for the hashtagged word (and for the standard spelling of commonly misspelled words). In 2010, Twitter introduced "Trending Topics" on the Twitter front page, displaying hashtags that are rapidly becoming popular.



According to an article in The Guardian, the term octothorpe was invented by engineers at Bell Laboratories in the early 1960s. They wanted a name for one of two non-number function symbols on the first touch-tone keypads (the other was the *, which they called a sextile). The term was practically unheard of among the general public until Twitter arrived.


Oxford Dictionaries claim hash has its origin in the 1980s: probably from the verb sense of hatch, altered by folk etymology, meaning 'to cut, engrave, or draw a series of lines'.


The earliest recorded usage of the octothorpe symbol as an abbreviation or shorthand for pound, as in weight, is dated 1923 by the OED:



1923 W. E. HARNED Typewriting Stud. II. 29/1 Special Signs and Characters..#..Number or pound sign; # 10 (No. 10); 10# (ten pounds).



On a survey on keypad terminology conducted by the University of Edinburgh it was noted that the most common names for Keys to the Right of Zero were: square, hash and gate


enter image description here


Other names for the octothorpe



  • number sign (USA)

  • pound sign/symbol (USA)

  • tick-tack-toe sign/tictactoe

  • the crosshatch symbol

  • the double-cross symbol

  • hash mark/sign (UK)

  • gate (UK, and in Italian it is called cancelletto)

  • square (UK)

  • crunch

  • a symbol for fracture

  • space (in proofreading "#" indicates "insert space here")


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