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Wikipedia

Number sign

The symbol # is known variously in English-speaking regions as the number sign,[1] hash,[2] or pound sign.[3] The symbol has historically been used for a wide range of purposes including the designation of an ordinal number and as a ligatured abbreviation for pounds avoirdupois – having been derived from the now-rare .[4]

#
Number sign
In UnicodeU+0023 # NUMBER SIGN (#)
Different from
Different fromU+266F MUSIC SHARP SIGN
U+2317 VIEWDATA SQUARE
U+22D5 EQUAL AND PARALLEL TO
Related
See alsoU+00A3 £ POUND SIGN
U+2116 NUMERO SIGN

Since 2007, widespread usage of the symbol to introduce metadata tags on social media platforms has led to such tags being known as "hashtags",[5] and from that, the symbol itself is sometimes called a hashtag.[6]

The symbol is distinguished from similar symbols by its combination of level horizontal strokes and right-tilting vertical strokes.

History edit

 
A stylized version of the abbreviation for libra pondo ("pound weight")
 
The abbreviation written by Isaac Newton, showing the evolution from "℔" toward "#"

It is believed that the symbol traces its origins to the symbol ,[a] an abbreviation of the Roman term libra pondo, which translates as "pound weight".[7][8] The abbreviation "lb" was printed as a dedicated ligature including a horizontal line across (which indicated abbreviation).[9][8] Ultimately, the symbol was reduced for clarity as an overlay of two horizontal strokes "=" across two slash-like strokes "//".[8]

The symbol is described as the "number" character in an 1853 treatise on bookkeeping,[10] and its double meaning is described in a bookkeeping text from 1880.[11] The instruction manual of the Blickensderfer model 5 typewriter (c. 1896) appears to refer to the symbol as the "number mark".[12] Some early-20th-century U.S. sources refer to it as the "number sign",[13] although this could also refer to the numero sign (№).[14] A 1917 manual distinguishes between two uses of the sign: "number (written before a figure)" and "pounds (written after a figure)".[15] The use of the phrase "pound sign" to refer to this symbol is found from 1932 in U.S. usage.[16] The term hash sign is found in South African writings from the late 1960s[17] and from other non-North-American sources in the 1970s.[citation needed]

For mechanical devices, the symbol appeared on the keyboard of the Remington Standard typewriter (c. 1886).[18] It appeared in many of the early teleprinter codes and from there was copied to ASCII, which made it available on computers and thus caused many more uses to be found for the character. The symbol was introduced on the bottom right button of touch-tone keypads in 1968, but that button was not extensively used until the advent of large-scale voicemail (PBX systems, etc.) in the early 1980s.[4]

One of the uses in computers was to label the following text as having a different interpretation (such as a command or a comment) from the rest of the text. It was adopted for use within internet relay chat (IRC) networks circa 1988 to label groups and topics.[19] This usage inspired Chris Messina to propose a similar system to be used on Twitter to tag topics of interest on the microblogging network;[20][21] this became known as a hashtag. Although used initially and most popularly on Twitter, hashtag use has extended to other social media sites.[22]

Names edit

Number sign

"Number sign" is the name chosen by the Unicode consortium. Most common in Canada[23] and the northeastern United States.[citation needed] American telephone equipment companies which serve Canadian callers often have an option in their programming to denote Canadian English, which in turn instructs the system to say number sign to callers instead of pound.[24]

Pound sign or pound

In the United States, the "#" key on a phone is commonly referred to as the pound sign, pound key, or simply pound. Dialing instructions to an extension such as #77, for example, can be read as "pound seven seven".[25] This name is rarely used outside the United States, where the term pound sign is understood to mean the currency symbol £.

Hash, hash mark, hashmark

In the United Kingdom,[26] Australia,[27] and some other countries,[citation needed] it is generally called a "hash" (probably from "hatch", referring to cross-hatching[28]).
Programmers also use this term; for instance #! is "hash, bang" or "shebang".

Hashtag

Derived from the previous, the word "hashtag" is often used when reading social media messages aloud, indicating the start of a hashtag. For instance, the text "#foo" is often read out loud as "hashtag foo" (as opposed to "hash foo"). This leads to the common belief that the symbol itself is called hashtag.[6] Twitter documentation refers to it as "the hashtag symbol".[29]

Hex

"Hex" is commonly used in Singapore and Malaysia, as spoken by many recorded telephone directory-assistance menus: "Please enter your phone number followed by the 'hex' key". The term "hex" is discouraged in Singapore in favour of "hash". In Singapore, a hash is also called "hex" in apartment addresses, where it precedes the floor number.[30][31]

Octothorp, octothorpe, octathorp, octatherp

Most scholars believe the word was invented by workers at the Bell Telephone Laboratories by 1968,[32] who needed a word for the symbol on the telephone keypad. Don MacPherson is said to have created the word by combining octo and the last name of Jim Thorpe, an Olympic medalist.[33] Howard Eby and Lauren Asplund claim to have invented the word as a joke in 1964, combining octo with the syllable therp which, because of the "th" digraph, was hard to pronounce in different languages.[34] The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, 1991, has a long article that is consistent with Doug Kerr's essay,[34] which says "octotherp" was the original spelling, and that the word arose in the 1960s among telephone engineers as a joke. Other hypotheses for the origin of the word include the last name of James Oglethorpe[35] or using the Old English word for village, thorp, because the symbol looks like a village surrounded by eight fields.[36][37] The word was popularized within and outside Bell Labs.[38] The first appearance of "octothorp" in a US patent is in a 1973 filing. This patent also refers to the six-pointed asterisk (✻) used on telephone buttons as a "sextile".[39]

Sharp

Use of the name "sharp" is due to the symbol's resemblance to U+266F MUSIC SHARP SIGN. The same derivation is seen in the name of the Microsoft programming languages C#, J# and F#. Microsoft says that the name C# is pronounced 'see sharp'."[40] According to the ECMA-334 C# Language Specification, the name of the language is written "C#" ("LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C (U+0043) followed by the NUMBER SIGN # (U+0023)") and pronounced "C Sharp".[41]

Square

 
Detail of a telephone keypad displaying the Viewdata square
On telephones, the International Telecommunication Union specification ITU-T E.161 3.2.2 states: "The symbol may be referred to as the square or the most commonly used equivalent term in other languages."[42] Formally, this is not a number sign but rather another character, U+2317 VIEWDATA SQUARE. The real or virtual keypads on almost all modern telephones use the simple # instead, as does most documentation.[citation needed]

Other

Names that may be seen include:[4][43][better source needed] crosshatch, crunch, fence, flash, garden fence, garden gate, gate, grid, hak, mesh, oof, pig-pen, punch mark, rake, scratch, scratch mark, tic-tac-toe, and unequal.

Usage edit

When ⟨#⟩ prefixes a number, it is read as "number". "A #2 pencil", for example, indicates "a number-two pencil". The abbreviations 'No.' and '№' are used commonly and interchangeably. The use of ⟨#⟩ as an abbreviation for "number" is common in informal writing, but use in print is rare.[44] Where Americans might write "Symphony #5", British and Irish people usually write "Symphony No. 5".[citation needed]

When ⟨#⟩ is after a number, it is read as "pound" or "pounds", meaning the unit of weight. The text "5# bag of flour" would mean "five-pound bag of flour". The abbreviations "lb." and "℔" are used commonly and interchangeably. This usage is rare outside North America, where "lb' or "lbs" is used.

⟨#⟩ is not a replacement for the pound sign ⟨£⟩, but British typewriters and keyboards have a £ key where American keyboards have a # key.[45] Many early computer and teleprinter codes (such as BS 4730 (the UK national variant of the ISO/IEC 646 character set) substituted "£" for "#" to make the British versions, thus it was common for the same binary code to display as # on US equipment and £ on British equipment ("$" was not substituted to avoid confusing dollars and pounds in financial communications).

Mathematics edit

Computing edit

  • In Unicode and ASCII, the symbol has a code point as U+0023 # NUMBER SIGN and # in HTML5.[46]
  • In many scripting languages and data file formats, especially ones that originated on Unix, # introduces a comment that goes to the end of the line.[47] The combination #! at the start of an executable file is a "shebang", "hash-bang" or "pound-bang", used to tell the operating system which program to use to run the script (see magic number). This combination was chosen so it would be a comment in the scripting languages.
    • #! is the symbol of the CrunchBang Linux distribution.
  • In the Perl programming language, # is used as a modifier to array syntax to return the index number of the last element in the array, e.g., an array's last element is at $array[$#array]. The number of elements in the array is $#array + 1, since Perl arrays default to using zero-based indices. If the array has not been defined, the return is also undefined. If the array is defined but has not had any elements assigned to it, e.g., @array = (), then $#array returns −1. See the section on Array functions in the Perl language structure article.
  • In both the C and C++ preprocessors, as well as in other syntactically C-like languages, # is used to start a preprocessor directive. Inside macros, after #define, it is used for various purposes; for example, the double pound (hash) sign ## is used for token concatenation.
  • In Unix shells, # is placed by convention at the end of a command prompt to denote that the user is working as root.
  • # is used in a URL of a web page or other resource to introduce a "fragment identifier" – an id which defines a position within that resource. In HTML, this is known as an anchor link. For example, in the URL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign#Computing the portion after the # (Computing) is the fragment identifier, in this case denoting that the display should be moved to show the tag marked by <span id="Computing">...</span> in the HTML.[48]
  • Internet Relay Chat: on (IRC) servers, # precedes the name of every channel that is available across an entire IRC network.
  • In blogs, # is sometimes used to denote a permalink for that particular weblog entry.
  • In lightweight markup languages, such as wikitext, # is often used to introduce numbered list items.
  • # is used in the Modula-2 and Oberon programming languages designed by Niklaus Wirth and in the Component Pascal language derived from Oberon to denote the not equal symbol, as a stand-in for the mathematical unequal sign , being more intuitive than <> or !=. For example: IF i # 0 THEN ...
  • In Rust, # is used for attributes such as in #[test].
  • In OCaml, # is the operator used to call a method.
  • In Common Lisp,[49] # is a dispatching read macro character used to extend the S-expression syntax with short cuts and support for various data types (complex numbers, vectors and more).
  • In Scheme, # is the prefix for certain syntax with special meaning.
  • In Standard ML, #, when prefixed to a field name, becomes a projection function (function to access the field of a record or tuple); also, # prefixes a string literal to turn it into a character literal.
  • In Mathematica syntax, #, when used as a variable, becomes a pure function (a placeholder that is mapped to any variable meeting the conditions).
  • In LaTeX, #, when prefixing a number, references an arguments for a user defined command. For instance \newcommand{\code}[1]{\texttt{#1}}.
  • In Javadoc,[50] # is used with the @see tag to introduce or separate a field, constructor, or method member from its containing class.
  • In Redcode and some other dialects of assembly language, # is used to denote immediate mode addressing, e.g., LDA #10, which means "load accumulator A with the value 10" in MOS 6502 assembly language.
  • in HTML, CSS, SVG, and other computing applications # is used to identify a color specified in hexadecimal format, e.g., #FFAA00. This usage comes from X11 color specifications, which inherited it from early assembler dialects that used # to prefix hexadecimal constants, e.g.: ZX Spectrum Z80 assembly.[51]
  • In Be-Music Script, every command line starts with #. Lines starting with characters other than "#" are treated as comments.
  • The use of the hash symbol in a hashtag is a phenomenon conceived by Chris Messina, and popularized by social media network Twitter, as a way to direct conversations and topics amongst users. This has led to an increasingly common tendency to refer to the symbol itself as "hashtag".[52]
  • In programming languages like PL/1 and Assembler used on IBM mainframe systems, as well as JCL (Job Control Language), the # (along with $ and @) are used as additional letters in identifiers, labels and data set names.
  • In J, # is the Tally or Count function,[53] and similarly in Lua, # can be used as a shortcut to get the length of a table, or get the length of a string. Due to the ease of writing "#" over longer function names, this practice has become standard in the Lua community.
  • In Dyalog APL, # is a reference to the root namespace while ## is a reference to the current space's parent namespace.

Other uses edit

  • Algebraic notation for chess: A hash after a move denotes checkmate.
  • American Sign Language transcription: The hash prefixing an all-caps word identifies a lexicalized fingerspelled sign, having some sort of blends or letter drops. All-caps words without the prefix are used for standard English words that are fingerspelled in their entirety.[54]
  • Copy writing and copy editing: Technical writers in press releases often use three number signs, ### directly above the boilerplate or underneath the body copy, indicating to media that there is no further copy to come.[55]
  • Footnote symbols (or endnote symbols): Due to ready availability in many fonts and directly on computer keyboards, "#" and other symbols (such as the caret) have in recent years begun to be occasionally used in catalogues and reports in place of more traditional symbols (esp. dagger, double-dagger, pilcrow).
  • Linguistic phonology: # denotes a word boundary. For instance, /d/ → [t] / _# means that /d/ becomes [t] when it is the last segment in a word (i.e. when it appears before a word boundary).
  • Linguistic syntax: A hash before an example sentence denotes that the sentence is semantically ill-formed, though grammatically well-formed. For instance, "#The toothbrush is pregnant" is a grammatically correct sentence, but the meaning is odd.[56][57]
  • Medical prescription drug delimiter: In some countries, such as Norway or Poland, # is used as a delimiter between different drugs on medical prescriptions.
  • Medical shorthand: The hash is often used to indicate a bone fracture.[58] For example, "#NOF" is often used for "fractured neck of femur". In radiotherapy, a full dose of radiation is divided into smaller doses or 'fractions'. These are given the shorthand # to denote either the number of treatments in a prescription (e.g. 60Gy in 30#), or the fraction number (#9 of 25).
  • As a proofreading mark, to indicate that a space should be inserted.[59]
  • Publishing: When submitting a science fiction manuscript for publication, a number sign on a line by itself (indented or centered) indicates a section break in the text.[60]
  • Scrabble: Putting a number sign after a word indicates that the word is found in the British word lists, but not the North American lists.[61]
  • Teletext and DVB subtitles (in the UK and Ireland): The hash symbol, resembling music notation's sharp sign, is used to mark text that is either sung by a character or heard in background music, e.g. # For he's a jolly good fellow #

Unicode edit

The number sign was assigned code 35 (hex 0x23) in ASCII where it was inherited by many character sets. In EBCDIC it is often at 0x7B or 0xEC.

Unicode characters with "number sign" in their names:

  • U+0023 # NUMBER SIGN Other attested names in Unicode are: POUND SIGN, HASH, CROSSHATCH, OCTOTHORPE.
  • U+0600 ؀ ARABIC NUMBER SIGN
  • U+0BFA TAMIL NUMBER SIGN
  • U+1AC6 COMBINING NUMBER SIGN ABOVE
  • U+FE5F SMALL NUMBER SIGN
  • U+FF03 FULLWIDTH NUMBER SIGN
  • U+110BD KAITHI NUMBER SIGN
  • U+110CD 𑃍 KAITHI NUMBER SIGN ABOVE
  • U+11FE9 𑿩 TAMIL TRADITIONAL NUMBER SIGN
  • U+E0023 TAG NUMBER SIGN

Additionally, a Unicode named sequence KEYCAP NUMBER SIGN is defined for the grapheme cluster U+0023+FE0F+20E3 (#️⃣).[62]

On keyboards edit

On the standard US keyboard layout, the # symbol is ⇧ Shift+3. On standard UK and some other European keyboards, the same keystrokes produce the pound (sterling) sign, £ symbol, and # may be moved to a separate key above the right shift key. If there is no key, the symbol can be produced on Windows with Alt+35, on Mac OS with ⌥ Opt+3, and on Linux with Compose++.

See also edit

Explanatory notes edit

  1. ^ U+2114 L B BAR SYMBOL

References edit

  1. ^ . Oxford English Dictionary. Archived from the original on April 3, 2018.
  2. ^ . Oxford English Dictionary. Archived from the original on December 31, 2017.
  3. ^ . Oxford English Dictionary. Archived from the original on April 3, 2018. Retrieved 5 May 2016.
  4. ^ a b c Houston, Keith (2013). "The Octothorpe". Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. W. W. Norton & Company. pp. 41–57. ISBN 978-0-393-06442-1.
  5. ^ Piercy, Joseph (25 October 2013). "Part III: Symbnols of value, ownership and exchange". Symbols: A Universal Language. Michael OMara. pp. 84–85. ISBN 978-1-78243-073-5. Retrieved 4 October 2014.
  6. ^ a b "Why is the symbol # called the hashtag in Twitter?". The Britannica Dictionary. from the original on 2022-09-23. Retrieved 2022-09-23.
  7. ^ Keith Gordon Irwin (1967) [1956]. The romance of writing, from Egyptian hieroglyphics to modern letters, numbers, and signs. New York: Viking Press. p. 125. The Italian libbra (from the old Latin word libra, 'balance') represented a weight almost exactly equal to the avoirdupois pound of England. The Italian abbreviation of lb with a line drawn across the letters was used for both weights.
  8. ^ a b c Houston, Keith (2013-09-06). "The Ancient Roots of Punctuation". The New Yorker. from the original on 2014-06-25. Retrieved 16 October 2013.
  9. ^ . The Royal Mint Museum. Archived from the original on 8 March 2020. It is not known for certain when the horizontal line or lines, which indicate an abbreviation, first came to be drawn through the L.
  10. ^ Crittendon, S. W. (1853). An Elementary Treatise on Book-keeping by Single and Double Entry. Philadelphia: E., C., & J. Biddle. p. 10. Retrieved 7 February 2023.
  11. ^ Duff, C. P.; Duff, W. H.; Duff, R. P. (1880). Book-Keeping By Single and Double Entry. Harper and Brothers. p. 21. Retrieved 24 November 2015.
  12. ^ (PDF). Atlanta, GA: K. M. Turner. 1896. p. 14. Archived from the original (PDF) on Oct 14, 2021. It is best to use the 'number mark' for plus; the hyphen for minus, and two hyphens for the sign =
  13. ^ e.g. J. W. Marley, "The Detection and Illustration of Forgery By Comparison of Handwriting", in Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Convention of the Kansas Bankers' Association. Kansas City: Rusell. 1903. p. 180.
  14. ^ e.g. The British Printer vol. viii (1895), p. 395
  15. ^ Thurston, Ernest L. (1917). Business Arithmetic for Secondary Schools. New York: Macmillan. p. 419. business symbols pound.
  16. ^ Lawrence, Nancy M.; F. Ethel McAfee; Mildred M. Butler (1932). Correlated studies in stenography. Gregg. p. 141.
  17. ^ Research Review. Navorsingsoorsig vols. 18–21, pp. 117, 259 (1968)
  18. ^ "Remington Standard typewriter". New York: Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict. 1886. p. 50.
  19. ^ "Channel Scope". Section 2.2. RFC 2811
  20. ^ "#OriginStory". Carnegie Mellon University. August 29, 2014. from the original on June 1, 2019. Retrieved August 23, 2019.
  21. ^ Parker, Ashley (June 10, 2011). "Twitter's Secret Handshake". The New York Times. from the original on Jun 17, 2011. Retrieved July 26, 2011.
  22. ^ Warren, Christina. "Facebook finally gets #hashtags". CNN. from the original on Jun 13, 2013. Retrieved July 16, 2006.
  23. ^ Barber, Katherine, ed. (2004). The Canadian Oxford dictionary (2nd ed.). Toronto: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195418166.
  24. ^ "Norstar Voice Mail 4.1 | Software Add-on Guide". Nortel. p. 12. from the original on 2015-12-22. Retrieved 2015-12-11.
  25. ^ William Safire (March 24, 1991). "On Language; Hit the Pound Sign". The New York Times. from the original on July 21, 2010. Retrieved May 21, 2011.
  26. ^ "How the # became the sign of our times". The Guardian. from the original on 31 December 2014. Retrieved 30 December 2014.
  27. ^ "Writing Tips: How to Use the Hash Sign (#)". GetProofed. 6 February 2020. from the original on 9 January 2023. Retrieved 9 January 2023. In Australia, however, it was better known as the 'hash' sign and only used to mean 'number'.
  28. ^ "Hash sign". Oxford English Dictionary. from the original on 16 November 2018. Retrieved 14 October 2013.
  29. ^ "Using hashtags on Twitter". Twitter. from the original on 4 May 2016. Retrieved 5 May 2016.
  30. ^ Jack Tsen-Ta Lee. "A Dictionary of Singlish and Singapore English". from the original on 19 January 2016. Retrieved 14 January 2016.
  31. ^ "Address Formats". from the original on 8 March 2016. Retrieved 14 January 2016.
  32. ^ Hochhester, Sheldon (2006-09-29). "Pressing Matters: Touch-tone phones spark debate" (PDF). Encore. (PDF) from the original on 2007-09-26. Retrieved 2006-12-17.
  33. ^ Ralph Carlsen, "What the ####?" Telecoms Heritage Journal 28 (1996): 52–53.
  34. ^ a b Douglas A. Kerr (2006-05-07). "The ASCII Character "Octatherp"" (PDF). (PDF) from the original on 2010-12-15. Retrieved 2010-08-23.
  35. ^ John Baugh, Robert Hass, Maxine H. Kingston, et al., "Octothorpe", The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000)
  36. ^ Quinion, Michael (19 May 2010). "Octothorpe". World Wide Words. from the original on 18 May 2016. Retrieved 10 May 2016.
  37. ^ Bringhurst, "Octothorpe". Elements of Typographic Style
  38. ^ "You Asked Us: About the * and # on the New Phones", The Calgary Herald, September 9, 1972, 90.
  39. ^ "U.S. Patent No. 3,920,926". from the original on 2 March 2013. Retrieved 16 September 2014.
  40. ^ "A tour of the C# language". learn.microsoft.com. 5 April 2023. from the original on 8 March 2024. Retrieved 4 April 2024.
  41. ^ "Introduction". ECMA-334 C# language specification (PDF) (7th ed.). Ecma International. December 2023. p. xxiii. (PDF) from the original on 16 December 2023. Retrieved 4 April 2024.
  42. ^ "E.161 : Arrangement of digits, letters and symbols on telephones and other devices that can be used for gaining access to a telephone network". International Telecommunication Union. 2 February 2001. from the original on 2 November 2019. Retrieved 23 December 2019.
  43. ^ "Pronunciation guide for Unix - Bash - SS64.com". from the original on 14 August 2014. Retrieved 16 September 2014.
  44. ^ "Google Ngram Viewer". from the original on 2024-04-05. Retrieved 2021-02-05.
  45. ^ Fortunato, Joe (Jul 1, 2013). "The Hashtag: A History Deeper than Twitter". Copypress. from the original on 30 December 2014. Retrieved 30 December 2014.
  46. ^ HTML5 is the only version of HTML that has a named entity for the number sign, see https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html 2018-04-01 at the Wayback Machine ("The following sections present the complete lists of character entity references.") and https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/CR-html5-20140731/syntax.html#named-character-references 2017-08-05 at the Wayback Machine ("num;").
  47. ^ "CSS Syntax and Selectors". W3Schools. from the original on 2019-07-12. Retrieved 2019-07-15.
  48. ^ "Introduction to HTML". from the original on 16 August 2008. Retrieved 16 September 2014.
  49. ^ "Lispworks.com". from the original on 10 October 2014. Retrieved 16 September 2014.
  50. ^ "Oracle.com". from the original on 28 October 2011. Retrieved 16 September 2014.
  51. ^ "HISOFT DEVPAC ZX Spectrum Programmer's Manual" (PDF). worldofspectrum.org. (PDF) from the original on 2018-11-12. Retrieved 2017-10-03.
  52. ^ Nicks, Denver (June 13, 2014). "You'll Never Guess the Real Name for a Hashtag". TIME. from the original on May 11, 2016. Retrieved May 5, 2016.
  53. ^ "Vocabulary/number". J NuVoc. from the original on February 14, 2020. Retrieved November 20, 2019.
  54. ^ Vicars, Bill. "Lexicalization". ASL University. from the original on 10 September 2015. Retrieved 6 September 2015.
  55. ^ Cohn, Lara. "###: What does ### mean at the end of a press release?". The Halo Group. from the original on 17 November 2021. Retrieved 18 November 2021.
  56. ^ Carnie, Andrew (2006). Syntax: A Generative Introduction (2nd ed.). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 1-4051-3384-8.
  57. ^ Trask, R. L. (1993). A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics. London: Routledge. p. 125. ISBN 0-415-08627-2.
  58. ^ "Glossary of Medical Devices and Procedures: Abbreviations, Acronyms, and Definitions" (PDF). (PDF) from the original on 2008-06-25. Retrieved 2008-05-16.
  59. ^ . Archived from the original on 2010-08-16. Retrieved 2020-09-03. from Merriam Webster
  60. ^ McIntyre, Vonda (October 2008). "Manuscript Preparation" (PDF). sfwa.org. Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. (PDF) from the original on 3 October 2020. Retrieved 28 May 2020.
  61. ^ . Tucson Scrabble Club. Archived from the original on 2011-08-30. Retrieved 2012-02-06.
  62. ^ Unicode Consortium. "Unicode Named Character Sequences". Unicode Character Database. from the original on 2020-07-11. Retrieved 2020-07-16.

number, sign, confused, with, numero, sign, sharp, music, symbol, known, variously, english, speaking, regions, number, sign, hash, pound, sign, symbol, historically, been, used, wide, range, purposes, including, designation, ordinal, number, ligatured, abbrev. Not to be confused with the Numero sign or Sharp music The symbol is known variously in English speaking regions as the number sign 1 hash 2 or pound sign 3 The symbol has historically been used for a wide range of purposes including the designation of an ordinal number and as a ligatured abbreviation for pounds avoirdupois having been derived from the now rare 4 Number signIn UnicodeU 0023 NUMBER SIGN amp num Different fromDifferent fromU 266F MUSIC SHARP SIGNU 2317 VIEWDATA SQUAREU 22D5 EQUAL AND PARALLEL TORelatedSee alsoU 00A3 POUND SIGNU 2116 NUMERO SIGN Since 2007 widespread usage of the symbol to introduce metadata tags on social media platforms has led to such tags being known as hashtags 5 and from that the symbol itself is sometimes called a hashtag 6 The symbol is distinguished from similar symbols by its combination of level horizontal strokes and right tilting vertical strokes Contents 1 History 2 Names 3 Usage 3 1 Mathematics 3 2 Computing 3 3 Other uses 4 Unicode 5 On keyboards 6 See also 7 Explanatory notes 8 ReferencesHistory edit nbsp A stylized version of the abbreviation for libra pondo pound weight nbsp The abbreviation written by Isaac Newton showing the evolution from toward It is believed that the symbol traces its origins to the symbol a an abbreviation of the Roman term libra pondo which translates as pound weight 7 8 The abbreviation lb was printed as a dedicated ligature including a horizontal line across which indicated abbreviation 9 8 Ultimately the symbol was reduced for clarity as an overlay of two horizontal strokes across two slash like strokes 8 The symbol is described as the number character in an 1853 treatise on bookkeeping 10 and its double meaning is described in a bookkeeping text from 1880 11 The instruction manual of the Blickensderfer model 5 typewriter c 1896 appears to refer to the symbol as the number mark 12 Some early 20th century U S sources refer to it as the number sign 13 although this could also refer to the numero sign 14 A 1917 manual distinguishes between two uses of the sign number written before a figure and pounds written after a figure 15 The use of the phrase pound sign to refer to this symbol is found from 1932 in U S usage 16 The term hash sign is found in South African writings from the late 1960s 17 and from other non North American sources in the 1970s citation needed For mechanical devices the symbol appeared on the keyboard of the Remington Standard typewriter c 1886 18 It appeared in many of the early teleprinter codes and from there was copied to ASCII which made it available on computers and thus caused many more uses to be found for the character The symbol was introduced on the bottom right button of touch tone keypads in 1968 but that button was not extensively used until the advent of large scale voicemail PBX systems etc in the early 1980s 4 One of the uses in computers was to label the following text as having a different interpretation such as a command or a comment from the rest of the text It was adopted for use within internet relay chat IRC networks circa 1988 to label groups and topics 19 This usage inspired Chris Messina to propose a similar system to be used on Twitter to tag topics of interest on the microblogging network 20 21 this became known as a hashtag Although used initially and most popularly on Twitter hashtag use has extended to other social media sites 22 Names editNumber sign Number sign is the name chosen by the Unicode consortium Most common in Canada 23 and the northeastern United States citation needed American telephone equipment companies which serve Canadian callers often have an option in their programming to denote Canadian English which in turn instructs the system to say number sign to callers instead of pound 24 Pound sign or pound In the United States the key on a phone is commonly referred to as the pound sign pound key or simply pound Dialing instructions to an extension such as 77 for example can be read as pound seven seven 25 This name is rarely used outside the United States where the term pound sign is understood to mean the currency symbol Hash hash mark hashmark In the United Kingdom 26 Australia 27 and some other countries citation needed it is generally called a hash probably from hatch referring to cross hatching 28 Programmers also use this term for instance is hash bang or shebang Hashtag Derived from the previous the word hashtag is often used when reading social media messages aloud indicating the start of a hashtag For instance the text foo is often read out loud as hashtag foo as opposed to hash foo This leads to the common belief that the symbol itself is called hashtag 6 Twitter documentation refers to it as the hashtag symbol 29 Hex Hex is commonly used in Singapore and Malaysia as spoken by many recorded telephone directory assistance menus Please enter your phone number followed by the hex key The term hex is discouraged in Singapore in favour of hash In Singapore a hash is also called hex in apartment addresses where it precedes the floor number 30 31 Octothorp octothorpe octathorp octatherp Most scholars believe the word was invented by workers at the Bell Telephone Laboratories by 1968 32 who needed a word for the symbol on the telephone keypad Don MacPherson is said to have created the word by combining octo and the last name of Jim Thorpe an Olympic medalist 33 Howard Eby and Lauren Asplund claim to have invented the word as a joke in 1964 combining octo with the syllable therp which because of the th digraph was hard to pronounce in different languages 34 The Merriam Webster New Book of Word Histories 1991 has a long article that is consistent with Doug Kerr s essay 34 which says octotherp was the original spelling and that the word arose in the 1960s among telephone engineers as a joke Other hypotheses for the origin of the word include the last name of James Oglethorpe 35 or using the Old English word for village thorp because the symbol looks like a village surrounded by eight fields 36 37 The word was popularized within and outside Bell Labs 38 The first appearance of octothorp in a US patent is in a 1973 filing This patent also refers to the six pointed asterisk used on telephone buttons as a sextile 39 Sharp Use of the name sharp is due to the symbol s resemblance to U 266F MUSIC SHARP SIGN The same derivation is seen in the name of the Microsoft programming languages C J and F Microsoft says that the name C is pronounced see sharp 40 According to the ECMA 334 C Language Specification the name of the language is written C LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C U 0043 followed by the NUMBER SIGN U 0023 and pronounced C Sharp 41 Square nbsp Detail of a telephone keypad displaying the Viewdata square On telephones the International Telecommunication Union specification ITU T E 161 3 2 2 states The symbol may be referred to as the square or the most commonly used equivalent term in other languages 42 Formally this is not a number sign but rather another character U 2317 VIEWDATA SQUARE The real or virtual keypads on almost all modern telephones use the simple instead as does most documentation citation needed Other Names that may be seen include 4 43 better source needed crosshatch crunch fence flash garden fence garden gate gate grid hak mesh oof pig pen punch mark rake scratch scratch mark tic tac toe and unequal Usage editWhen prefixes a number it is read as number A 2 pencil for example indicates a number two pencil The abbreviations No and are used commonly and interchangeably The use of as an abbreviation for number is common in informal writing but use in print is rare 44 Where Americans might write Symphony 5 British and Irish people usually write Symphony No 5 citation needed When is after a number it is read as pound or pounds meaning the unit of weight The text 5 bag of flour would mean five pound bag of flour The abbreviations lb and are used commonly and interchangeably This usage is rare outside North America where lb or lbs is used is not a replacement for the pound sign but British typewriters and keyboards have a key where American keyboards have a key 45 Many early computer and teleprinter codes such as BS 4730 the UK national variant of the ISO IEC 646 character set substituted for to make the British versions thus it was common for the same binary code to display as on US equipment and on British equipment was not substituted to avoid confusing dollars and pounds in financial communications Mathematics edit In set theory S is one possible notation for the cardinality or size of the set S instead of S displaystyle S nbsp That is for a set S s 1 s 2 s 3 s n displaystyle S s 1 s 2 s 3 dots s n nbsp in which all s i displaystyle s i nbsp are mutually distinct S n S displaystyle S n S nbsp This notation is only sometimes used for finite sets usually in number theory to avoid confusion with the divisibility symbol e g a b displaystyle a mid b nbsp In topology A B is the connected sum of manifolds A and B or of knots A and B in knot theory In number theory n is the primorial of n In constructive mathematics denotes an apartness relation In computational complexity theory P denotes a complexity class of counting problems The standard notation for this class uses the number sign symbol not the sharp sign from music but it is pronounced sharp P More generally the number sign may be used to denote the class of counting problems associated with any class of search problems Computing edit In Unicode and ASCII the symbol has a code point as U 0023 NUMBER SIGN and amp num in HTML5 46 In many scripting languages and data file formats especially ones that originated on Unix introduces a comment that goes to the end of the line 47 The combination at the start of an executable file is a shebang hash bang or pound bang used to tell the operating system which program to use to run the script see magic number This combination was chosen so it would be a comment in the scripting languages is the symbol of the CrunchBang Linux distribution In the Perl programming language is used as a modifier to array syntax to return the index number of the last element in the array e g an array s last element is at array array The number of elements in the array is array 1 since Perl arrays default to using zero based indices If the array has not been defined the return is also undefined If the array is defined but has not had any elements assigned to it e g array then array returns 1 See the section on Array functions in the Perl language structure article In both the C and C preprocessors as well as in other syntactically C like languages is used to start a preprocessor directive Inside macros after define it is used for various purposes for example the double pound hash sign is used for token concatenation In Unix shells is placed by convention at the end of a command prompt to denote that the user is working as root is used in a URL of a web page or other resource to introduce a fragment identifier an id which defines a position within that resource In HTML this is known as an anchor link For example in the URL https en wikipedia org wiki Number sign Computing the portion after the Computing is the fragment identifier in this case denoting that the display should be moved to show the tag marked by span class p lt span span class nt span span span class na id span span class o span span class s Computing span span class p gt span span class p lt span span class nt span span span class p gt span in the HTML 48 Internet Relay Chat on IRC servers precedes the name of every channel that is available across an entire IRC network In blogs is sometimes used to denote a permalink for that particular weblog entry In lightweight markup languages such as wikitext is often used to introduce numbered list items is used in the Modula 2 and Oberon programming languages designed by Niklaus Wirth and in the Component Pascal language derived from Oberon to denote the not equal symbol as a stand in for the mathematical unequal sign being more intuitive than lt gt or For example span class kr IF span span class n i span span class o span span class mi 0 span span class kr THEN span span class p span In Rust is used for attributes such as in test In OCaml is the operator used to call a method In Common Lisp 49 is a dispatching read macro character used to extend the S expression syntax with short cuts and support for various data types complex numbers vectors and more In Scheme is the prefix for certain syntax with special meaning In Standard ML when prefixed to a field name becomes a projection function function to access the field of a record or tuple also prefixes a string literal to turn it into a character literal In Mathematica syntax when used as a variable becomes a pure function a placeholder that is mapped to any variable meeting the conditions In LaTeX when prefixing a number references an arguments for a user defined command For instance span class k newcommand span span class nb span span class k code span span class nb span 1 span class nb span span class k texttt span span class nb span 1 span class nb span In Javadoc 50 is used with the see tag to introduce or separate a field constructor or method member from its containing class In Redcode and some other dialects of assembly language is used to denote immediate mode addressing e g LDA 10 which means load accumulator A with the value 10 in MOS 6502 assembly language in HTML CSS SVG and other computing applications is used to identify a color specified in hexadecimal format e g FFAA00 This usage comes from X11 color specifications which inherited it from early assembler dialects that used to prefix hexadecimal constants e g ZX Spectrum Z80 assembly 51 In Be Music Script every command line starts with Lines starting with characters other than are treated as comments The use of the hash symbol in a hashtag is a phenomenon conceived by Chris Messina and popularized by social media network Twitter as a way to direct conversations and topics amongst users This has led to an increasingly common tendency to refer to the symbol itself as hashtag 52 In programming languages like PL 1 and Assembler used on IBM mainframe systems as well as JCL Job Control Language the along with and are used as additional letters in identifiers labels and data set names In J is the Tally or Count function 53 and similarly in Lua can be used as a shortcut to get the length of a table or get the length of a string Due to the ease of writing over longer function names this practice has become standard in the Lua community In Dyalog APL is a reference to the root namespace while is a reference to the current space s parent namespace Other uses edit Algebraic notation for chess A hash after a move denotes checkmate American Sign Language transcription The hash prefixing an all caps word identifies a lexicalized fingerspelled sign having some sort of blends or letter drops All caps words without the prefix are used for standard English words that are fingerspelled in their entirety 54 Copy writing and copy editing Technical writers in press releases often use three number signs directly above the boilerplate or underneath the body copy indicating to media that there is no further copy to come 55 Footnote symbols or endnote symbols Due to ready availability in many fonts and directly on computer keyboards and other symbols such as the caret have in recent years begun to be occasionally used in catalogues and reports in place of more traditional symbols esp dagger double dagger pilcrow Linguistic phonology denotes a word boundary For instance d t means that d becomes t when it is the last segment in a word i e when it appears before a word boundary Linguistic syntax A hash before an example sentence denotes that the sentence is semantically ill formed though grammatically well formed For instance The toothbrush is pregnant is a grammatically correct sentence but the meaning is odd 56 57 Medical prescription drug delimiter In some countries such as Norway or Poland is used as a delimiter between different drugs on medical prescriptions Medical shorthand The hash is often used to indicate a bone fracture 58 For example NOF is often used for fractured neck of femur In radiotherapy a full dose of radiation is divided into smaller doses or fractions These are given the shorthand to denote either the number of treatments in a prescription e g 60Gy in 30 or the fraction number 9 of 25 As a proofreading mark to indicate that a space should be inserted 59 Publishing When submitting a science fiction manuscript for publication a number sign on a line by itself indented or centered indicates a section break in the text 60 Scrabble Putting a number sign after a word indicates that the word is found in the British word lists but not the North American lists 61 Teletext and DVB subtitles in the UK and Ireland The hash symbol resembling music notation s sharp sign is used to mark text that is either sung by a character or heard in background music e g For he s a jolly good fellow Unicode editThe number sign was assigned code 35 hex 0x23 in ASCII where it was inherited by many character sets In EBCDIC it is often at 0x7B or 0xEC Unicode characters with number sign in their names U 0023 NUMBER SIGN Other attested names in Unicode are POUND SIGN HASH CROSSHATCH OCTOTHORPE U 0600 ARABIC NUMBER SIGN U 0BFA TAMIL NUMBER SIGN U 1AC6 COMBINING NUMBER SIGN ABOVE U FE5F SMALL NUMBER SIGN U FF03 FULLWIDTH NUMBER SIGN U 110BD KAITHI NUMBER SIGN U 110CD KAITHI NUMBER SIGN ABOVE U 11FE9 TAMIL TRADITIONAL NUMBER SIGN U E0023 TAG NUMBER SIGN Additionally a Unicode named sequence KEYCAP NUMBER SIGN is defined for the grapheme cluster U 0023 FE0F 20E3 62 On keyboards editOn the standard US keyboard layout the symbol is Shift 3 On standard UK and some other European keyboards the same keystrokes produce the pound sterling sign symbol and may be moved to a separate key above the right shift key If there is no key the symbol can be produced on Windows with Alt 35 on Mac OS with Opt 3 and on Linux with Compose See also editpound sign sharp sign viewdata square equal and parallel to symbol looped square the Chinese character for well 井 the game tic tac toe For uses of within Wikipedia see Wikipedia Number sign Explanatory notes edit U 2114 L B BAR SYMBOLReferences edit number sign Oxford English Dictionary Archived from the original on April 3 2018 hash Oxford English Dictionary Archived from the original on December 31 2017 pound sign Oxford English Dictionary Archived from the original on April 3 2018 Retrieved 5 May 2016 a b c Houston Keith 2013 The Octothorpe Shady Characters The Secret Life of Punctuation Symbols and Other Typographical Marks W W Norton amp Company pp 41 57 ISBN 978 0 393 06442 1 Piercy Joseph 25 October 2013 Part III Symbnols of value ownership and exchange Symbols A Universal Language Michael OMara pp 84 85 ISBN 978 1 78243 073 5 Retrieved 4 October 2014 a b Why is the symbol called the hashtag in Twitter The Britannica Dictionary Archived from the original on 2022 09 23 Retrieved 2022 09 23 Keith Gordon Irwin 1967 1956 The romance of writing from Egyptian hieroglyphics to modern letters numbers and signs New York Viking Press p 125 The Italian libbra from the old Latin word libra balance represented a weight almost exactly equal to the avoirdupois pound of England The Italian abbreviation of lb with a line drawn across the letters was used for both weights a b c Houston Keith 2013 09 06 The Ancient Roots of Punctuation The New Yorker Archived from the original on 2014 06 25 Retrieved 16 October 2013 The Origins of sd The Royal Mint Museum Archived from the original on 8 March 2020 It is not known for certain when the horizontal line or lines which indicate an abbreviation first came to be drawn through the L Crittendon S W 1853 An Elementary Treatise on Book keeping by Single and Double Entry Philadelphia E C amp J Biddle p 10 Retrieved 7 February 2023 Duff C P Duff W H Duff R P 1880 Book Keeping By Single and Double Entry Harper and Brothers p 21 Retrieved 24 November 2015 Method of Operating and Instructions for Practice on the Blickensderfer Typewriter PDF Atlanta GA K M Turner 1896 p 14 Archived from the original PDF on Oct 14 2021 It is best to use the number mark for plus the hyphen for minus and two hyphens for the sign e g J W Marley The Detection and Illustration of Forgery By Comparison of Handwriting in Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Convention of the Kansas Bankers Association Kansas City Rusell 1903 p 180 e g The British Printer vol viii 1895 p 395 Thurston Ernest L 1917 Business Arithmetic for Secondary Schools New York Macmillan p 419 business symbols pound Lawrence Nancy M F Ethel McAfee Mildred M Butler 1932 Correlated studies in stenography Gregg p 141 Research Review Navorsingsoorsig vols 18 21 pp 117 259 1968 Remington Standard typewriter New York Wyckoff Seamans amp Benedict 1886 p 50 Channel Scope Section 2 2 RFC 2811 OriginStory Carnegie Mellon University August 29 2014 Archived from the original on June 1 2019 Retrieved August 23 2019 Parker Ashley June 10 2011 Twitter s Secret Handshake The New York Times Archived from the original on Jun 17 2011 Retrieved July 26 2011 Warren Christina Facebook finally gets hashtags CNN Archived from the original on Jun 13 2013 Retrieved July 16 2006 Barber Katherine ed 2004 The Canadian Oxford dictionary 2nd ed Toronto Oxford University Press ISBN 0195418166 Norstar Voice Mail 4 1 Software Add on Guide Nortel p 12 Archived from the original on 2015 12 22 Retrieved 2015 12 11 William Safire March 24 1991 On Language Hit the Pound Sign The New York Times Archived from the original on July 21 2010 Retrieved May 21 2011 How the became the sign of our times The Guardian Archived from the original on 31 December 2014 Retrieved 30 December 2014 Writing Tips How to Use the Hash Sign GetProofed 6 February 2020 Archived from the original on 9 January 2023 Retrieved 9 January 2023 In Australia however it was better known as the hash sign and only used to mean number Hash sign Oxford English Dictionary Archived from the original on 16 November 2018 Retrieved 14 October 2013 Using hashtags on Twitter Twitter Archived from the original on 4 May 2016 Retrieved 5 May 2016 Jack Tsen Ta Lee A Dictionary of Singlish and Singapore English Archived from the original on 19 January 2016 Retrieved 14 January 2016 Address Formats Archived from the original on 8 March 2016 Retrieved 14 January 2016 Hochhester Sheldon 2006 09 29 Pressing Matters Touch tone phones spark debate PDF Encore Archived PDF from the original on 2007 09 26 Retrieved 2006 12 17 Ralph Carlsen What the Telecoms Heritage Journal 28 1996 52 53 a b Douglas A Kerr 2006 05 07 The ASCII Character Octatherp PDF Archived PDF from the original on 2010 12 15 Retrieved 2010 08 23 John Baugh Robert Hass Maxine H Kingston et al Octothorpe The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language Boston Houghton Mifflin 2000 Quinion Michael 19 May 2010 Octothorpe World Wide Words Archived from the original on 18 May 2016 Retrieved 10 May 2016 Bringhurst Octothorpe Elements of Typographic Style You Asked Us About the and on the New Phones The Calgary Herald September 9 1972 90 U S Patent No 3 920 926 Archived from the original on 2 March 2013 Retrieved 16 September 2014 A tour of the C language learn microsoft com 5 April 2023 Archived from the original on 8 March 2024 Retrieved 4 April 2024 Introduction ECMA 334 C language specification PDF 7th ed Ecma International December 2023 p xxiii Archived PDF from the original on 16 December 2023 Retrieved 4 April 2024 E 161 Arrangement of digits letters and symbols on telephones and other devices that can be used for gaining access to a telephone network International Telecommunication Union 2 February 2001 Archived from the original on 2 November 2019 Retrieved 23 December 2019 Pronunciation guide for Unix Bash SS64 com Archived from the original on 14 August 2014 Retrieved 16 September 2014 Google Ngram Viewer Archived from the original on 2024 04 05 Retrieved 2021 02 05 Fortunato Joe Jul 1 2013 The Hashtag A History Deeper than Twitter Copypress Archived from the original on 30 December 2014 Retrieved 30 December 2014 HTML5 is the only version of HTML that has a named entity for the number sign see https www w3 org TR html4 sgml entities html Archived 2018 04 01 at the Wayback Machine The following sections present the complete lists of character entity references and https www w3 org TR 2014 CR html5 20140731 syntax html named character references Archived 2017 08 05 at the Wayback Machine num CSS Syntax and Selectors W3Schools Archived from the original on 2019 07 12 Retrieved 2019 07 15 Introduction to HTML Archived from the original on 16 August 2008 Retrieved 16 September 2014 Lispworks com Archived from the original on 10 October 2014 Retrieved 16 September 2014 Oracle com Archived from the original on 28 October 2011 Retrieved 16 September 2014 HISOFT DEVPAC ZX Spectrum Programmer s Manual PDF worldofspectrum org Archived PDF from the original on 2018 11 12 Retrieved 2017 10 03 Nicks Denver June 13 2014 You ll Never Guess the Real Name for a Hashtag TIME Archived from the original on May 11 2016 Retrieved May 5 2016 Vocabulary number J NuVoc Archived from the original on February 14 2020 Retrieved November 20 2019 Vicars Bill Lexicalization ASL University Archived from the original on 10 September 2015 Retrieved 6 September 2015 Cohn Lara What does mean at the end of a press release The Halo Group Archived from the original on 17 November 2021 Retrieved 18 November 2021 Carnie Andrew 2006 Syntax A Generative Introduction 2nd ed Oxford Wiley Blackwell ISBN 1 4051 3384 8 Trask R L 1993 A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics London Routledge p 125 ISBN 0 415 08627 2 Glossary of Medical Devices and Procedures Abbreviations Acronyms and Definitions PDF Archived PDF from the original on 2008 06 25 Retrieved 2008 05 16 Proofreaders Marks Archived from the original on 2010 08 16 Retrieved 2020 09 03 from Merriam Webster McIntyre Vonda October 2008 Manuscript Preparation PDF sfwa org Science Fiction amp Fantasy Writers of America Archived PDF from the original on 3 October 2020 Retrieved 28 May 2020 Scrabble Glossary Tucson Scrabble Club Archived from the original on 2011 08 30 Retrieved 2012 02 06 Unicode Consortium Unicode Named Character Sequences Unicode Character Database Archived from the original on 2020 07 11 Retrieved 2020 07 16 Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Number sign amp oldid 1223063169, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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