Is # a Hashtag, a Hash Mark, Octothorpe, or a Pound Sign?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Kathleen. I’m calling from Hebron, Connecticut.

Hi, Kathleen. Welcome. How can we help you?

I have a question. I’m interested in the name of a sign or a character or a symbol that I usually call a pound sign or a number sign, and I hear people call it a hashtag.

I’m very confused. Why?

And in what context do you hear it?

Well, I just hear it more when people are telling what they’re, if you want to get in touch with me, call this number, hashtag whatever.

I understand that because I don’t text or use anything like that, that’s why I don’t understand what they’re talking about.

I think I get what you’re saying.

So on a commercial, somebody will say, you can call our toll-free number or follow us on Twitter under the hashtag mattresses or whatever their product is.

Exactly.

Right.

That’s interesting because, so what that is, is a keyword.

So for the radio show, we might use language as our hashtag or Wayword as our hashtag.

And then we put the pound sign in front of it.

But it’s the hash plus the word that makes the hashtag.

The symbol itself is still called the hash or hash mark or pound sign or number sign.

Yeah.

And this is largely on Twitter, right?

Yeah.

I mean, that’s how you call attention to this or that topic.

Right.

But outside of Twitter, this particular symbol, we’re talking about two vertical lines, two horizontal lines.

They cross.

They kind of create a tic-tac-toe board with nine squares, right, and no outside border.

This has got a ton of names, and it really depends on the context and where you are or where you’re from.

That all comes into play when you decide what you’re going to call it.

Yeah, if I call customer service, they’re not going to say press the hashtag.

No, or the hash mark even.

They’ll say press the pound sign, right?

Right.

But if you are a programmer and you write software, you’re probably going to call it a hash.

Some people call it a hatch mark.

Actually, that’s the older name for it because it looks like cross-hatching, which are lines that cross each other.

You know, you might do a cross-hatch drawing with an ink pen.

Interesting.

I just was wondering why, and now I understand because I don’t use what they’re talking about.

Well, the Twitter hashtag is really interesting.

Might be misremembering this history here, but Twitter basically was created by people with lots of programming experience. And so when it came time to look for a symbol to do this particular job of connecting a lot of short messages together, kind of like tagging them or marking them as being of the same theme, they decided to go with this single character, which was more or less underused.

The same way they went with the at side for the Twitter handles. In programming, in a lot of languages, you put the hash sign before comments in code. And comments are the language that are just for other programmers reading the code. The computer is completely going to ignore those comments. But it’s just so if somebody else comes in and wants to finish your work or correct your work or just discover what you did, you left a comment saying, this particular function solves this problem. This is how I did it. And so you just use that hash there. So I could see how it easily just kind of leaped to the mind of the Twitter guys when they were making their software.

Well, that’s really interesting.

Well, we appreciate your calling. Thanks so much.

Thank you.

Thanks, Kathleen. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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