Kathleen from Hebron, Connecticut, is curious about the term hashtag. She associates it with the symbol #, which she calls a pound sign. When that symbol, also known as a hash mark, doublecross, hatch mark, octothorpe, or number sign, is appended to a keyword, the whole thing is known as a hashtag. It’s used on Twitter, among other places, to help label a message on a particular topic. This is part of a complete episode.
You must log in to post a comment.
Mimeographs and Dittos (episode #1502) 06/24/2018: In this episode: How colors got their names, and a strange way to write. The terms blue and orange arrived in English via French, so... [more]
Spicy Jambalaya 06/18/2018: Teen slang from the South, and food words that are tricky to pronounce. • High schoolers in Huntsville, Alabama, told Martha and Grant about their... [more]
Chopped Liver 06/10/2018: There's a proverb that goes "beloved children have many names." At least, that's true when it comes to the names we give our pets. "Fluffy"... [more]
Busted Melon 06/02/2018: When writing textbooks about slavery, which words best reflect its cold, hard reality? Some historians are dropping the word slave in favor of terms like... [more]
Truth and Beauty 05/28/2018: Malamute, kayak, and parka are just some of the words that have found their way into English from the language of indigenous people in northern... [more]
The hash mark has a number of names. One of the oddest is the “octothorpe”, also spelled octothorp, octathorp,and octatherp. In the 1960s and 70s when AT&T was preparing to introduce touch tone dialing, Bell Labs decided they needed two additional buttons to perform certain newly introduced functions. According to one story, one of their engineers noticed the sign as an eight-pointed figure, and added the suffix “thorpe” to pay homage to Olympian Jim Thorpe.
Al Zagofsky
Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania