Originally published at: "When you are done, press the octothorpe key". What do you call the # glyph? | Boing Boing
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The “gato” (cat) in Spanish, because it looks like the tic-tac-toe game which we call gato, and in English “hash” key.
Also, in Spanish, when calling an automated response system, the voice message might ask to press the “numeral” symbol.
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I still mostly call it the pound sign, unless I’m talking specifically about hashtags.
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Hash key, octothorpe is weird and pound is £
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Oh, is that why a few people I’ve met call a draw at that a “cat’s game”? I always wondered where that came from.
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It was the pound sign when I was growing up; at some point in the 21st century, it morphed into the ‘hashtag.’
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‘#’ is hash.
Shift-3 is pound ‘£’.
Shift-1 is pling ‘!’
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Octothorpe is one of my favorite weird words. Its 3rd on my list after syzygy and acnestis.
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Called it a pound sign, because of the phone, for about 50 years. A lot of the voice menus still say say to “press pound”, for example, when leaving a voice message or entering an account number.
Then after several "OK, Boomer"s, I switched to hashtag.
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It took them a year or two to add the pound key.
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Also called a “bang” by typographers
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We always knew it as the number sign, as in “World’s #1 Dad” or “The #1 Pontiac Dealer in the Tri-State Area”. I learned of its pound (US weight) meaning later in life. The “hash” meaning comes from programming, I think.
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In my younger days, I called it the tic-tac-toe button. As in, “can we even dial a phone number that has the tic-tac-toe in it?” Or, “what if we prank call somebody* and just press down on the tic-tac-toe button?” “Hey they’ve** got an answering machine. Wait for the beep and just hold down tic-tac-toe.” Ah, the summer of '81, one of my favorites…
*This was years before Caller ID
**“They” = the portable terlet company, because it’s funny that someone would call a company to talk about portable terlets
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Although, when you read it as “The Pound One Pontiac Dealer in the Tri-State Area” it actually makes more sense…
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And geeks! ! is “bang,” ? is “huh,” * can be “star” or “snowflake” or “splat.”
Scripts beginning with #! are said to begin with a “sh-bang” (as in hash-bang.)
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And by newspaper typesetters (in the UK at least) as a dog’s cock. Sorry.
The Spanish apparently call it the signo de admiración.
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In Italian we call it “cancelletto”, literally meaning “small gate”.
I find this name lovely and evocative: the word is colloquially used for any small pedestrian gates in hedges or fences.
Picture by Acabashi, CC BY-SA 4.0
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Smushed spider button.
ETA: sorry @newbrain, I meant to do a general reply rather than a direct one.
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In Japanese, it’s called “sharp” because it looks like the sheet music notation for sharp notes.
Incidentally, this symbol: ※ is called “kome (uncooked rice)” because it kind of looks like the kanji for uncooked rice: 米.
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If anyone knows the origin of this poem, please share:
< > ! * ’ ’ #
^ " ` $ $ -
! * = @ $ _
% * < > ~ # 4
& . . /
| { , , SYSTEM HALTED
Translation:
Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH!
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