A close friend recently asked me what is the name for #. My immediate answer was "hash". Apparently, the most common name these days is its social media one called the "hashtag". Besides that, I remembered a teacher once told me this symbol on the phone is called the "pound" sign which leads to its origin. According to this article in Dictionary.com's iOS app (which I am going to further dilute here), its real name was invented by Bell Laboratories scientists whom placed this symbol into the telephone to send instructions through. The name is... "Octothorpe".
How they came up with the name is unclear but "octo" came up because of its eight sides. Now that we know its real name, we can confidently call it the Octothorpe and repeat it really quickly 10 times with our noses pointing high up into the air. Heck, I'm tempted to call me self the blogger known as Octothorpe.
2 comments:
You are looking at the wrong dictionary, it's called Jǐng, use the Chinese dictionary
Oh my, there is no stopping the signs of globalisation! I think if this site was really popular, people from all over would tell me the name of this # in each of their own languages!
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