Octothorpe for life.
IIRC Twitter introduced using # to make words searchable across all of the tweets, hence the name.
It had potential to be a great way to index and find things based on key terms. The flaw was letting the normies use it.
I’m looking for an #apple #iPhone that comes in #orange #project16april2026 #all #frontpage #fyp #hot #ok #sale #android
Exactly that kind of shit lol
You just wanted to say ‘pound Taylor Swift’, didn’t you?
I always called it the number sign.
I think it was always called a hash but we read it as pound or number…7# or #7. Like how we say ‘and’ instead of saying ampersand.
Back in my day if someone said hash you knew you were in for a good time
Dude. I invited a coworker over for happy hour awhile back. She arrived after everyone else had left. I showed her a jar of hash i made. I didn’t know she would take a bite of it. We had a couple bottles of champagne. Shit got weird and she called her husband for a ride home about 2am.
Ampersand is such a fun word
…or ‘at’ instead of arobase.
I am happy to finally learn the actual name of the symbol and simultaneously sad to learn it’s not called the ampers_at_
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashtag#Origin_and_acceptance
I still remember, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, finding that somewhat weird too. I was already regularly using the Internet (including forums) well before hashtags were invented and when I started to see hashtags in all kinds of contexts, I on the one hand found it great that the Internet was apparently arriving in more people’s lives, and on the other hand somewhat disappointing that they weren’t using forums or wikis or anything like that that I was already highly familiar with, but this weird new thing called Twitter… oh well…
Contemporary to hashtags being invented on Twitter was the use of tags to categorize blog posts. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy
Also, note that hashtags on Twitter started as a grassroots convention before it was supported as an official feature.
The world (or at least the Anglosphere) has always called the # symbol the hash sign. I have no idea why Americans called it the pound sign - most places call the £ symbol the pound sign.
The term “hashtag” was not invented by an American. For the rest of us this makes sense - it’s a tag denoted by a hash sign - but I can see how it seemingly came out of nowhere if you used different words.
I have no idea why Americans called it the pound sign
In the old days, they called it a pound sign and actually used it to mean “pounds” as in weight. In a grocery store there might be a sign reading something like “10# bag Potatoes $1”.
I always read this as hash until I learn that the programming language C# is pronounced C sharp
In music, # denotes a sharp key or note and b denotes a flat key or note — this is Italian notation.
Traditionally in English, the # symbol was called the hash, because it looked like the end of a cooking implement used to hash vegetables (nowadays everyone would say mash instead).
In US typewriters, there was no £ symbol, so # was used to denote british pounds instead.
When the telephone button pad was created, there was room for two more symbols and tones, so the creators took the asterisk and hash from the typewriter and added them as extra signals.
When Twitter needed a way to denote a tagged word in a tweet, they decided to use the hash symbol.
Centuries of music has entered the chat
This was a joke question. The definition of “pound” as used in the context of OP’s question is newer than the definition of “#” as “hash”.
The term was popularized with Twitter but tags for search purposes etc had been a thing for a long time before then.
In France it was “dièse” (like “sharp” in music) and it became hashtag too. In Québec it’s the “carré” meaning the square, and people says hashtag now too.
It’s a sh, as in #!/
#!is “hash bang” so still hashI have always called that shebang.
Fascinating. The wikipedia page is for
shebangso clearly you are right.But the wikipedia page also cites it being called
hashbang– citing mostly o’reilly books.Now I’m intrigued, not that I have a lot of reason to talk about shell scripts, but I had never heard it called any other way.
TIL, thanks!
In college we were taught “hash exclamation, aka hash bang or shebang for short”.
I do un*x shell since the 90s, before linux, maybe this is why I have always called it that way
Funny how # is used in some programming/scripting languages to ignore stuff…but on twitter to pay attention to stuff
There may not be stupid questions, but this thread proves that there are certainly stupid answers.
When I was a kid, the * key was “squishbug”. Why did that change
Buttholes became more fashionable
