Funny how # is used in some programming/scripting languages to ignore stuff…but on twitter to pay attention to stuff
Octothorpe for life.
The symbol # is a “hash”. The “tag” Is the word that follows.
The hash exists as a signal to a computer program indexing posts by topic that the following characters before the next whitespace are meant to signify a tagging of a topic. Twitter started doing this a long time ago, to give users a way to categorize their posts by topic without needing a separate interface. (Did you know that the original 140 character tweet length was so it could fit in a single SMS message? Twitter used to be operable over text message). It’s likely that the # symbol was chosen because in URLs it’s used to signify a page anchor in HTML documents, such as a specific header or paragraph, and so similarly here it’s used to find specific topics; you’re anchoring your interest to something specific.
So it’s not a “hashtag” without the hash and the tag. #TIL
🌈⭐️ the more you know.
So it’s not a “hashtag” without the hash and the tag. #TIL
Technically, yes. Practically, I don’t think this is true. If you ask 100 people under 20 what “#” is called, 99 or 100 will say it’s a hashtag. Language shifts, and that’s becoming the common name for it, even without it tagging something.
IIRC Twitter introduced using # to make words searchable across all of the tweets, hence the name.
It had potential to be a great way to index and find things based on key terms. The flaw was letting the normies use it.
I’m looking for an #apple #iPhone that comes in #orange #project16april2026 #all #frontpage #fyp #hot #ok #sale #android
Exactly that kind of shit lol
I grew up with # being pound as well. The use of the pound symbol to highlight shit came from coding. Hash is another word for the pound symbol. It tags stuff. Ergo hashtag. Born in the glory years of Twitter.
£ - pound.
# - hash.
As far as I’m concerned (30s, UK) is always been that?
I think this is a common language divided by an ocean thing.
What are you talking about, the octothorpe?
https://snomoto.com/the-octothorpe-why-we-stopped-calling-it-a-hashtag-and-why-it-matters-1bol
You just wanted to say ‘pound Taylor Swift’, didn’t you?
I always called it the number sign.
To expand on what others are saying.
Hash is one of the many names for #. Twitter and other platforms allowed you to use hash to tag your posts with a searchable keyword. Hence “hash tag” which gets shortened to hashtag.
People on these platforms may have had cause to use and think about # on a much larger scale than would’ve been common at that time. Sure you may be asked to press pound on a phonecall once in a while, but that never happened often enough that I could fully keep it straight from star. It was usually just stored in my head as “the special phone key that isn’t star”
I think it was always called a hash but we read it as pound or number…7# or #7. Like how we say ‘and’ instead of saying ampersand.
Back in my day if someone said hash you knew you were in for a good time
Dude. I invited a coworker over for happy hour awhile back. She arrived after everyone else had left. I showed her a jar of hash i made. I didn’t know she would take a bite of it. We had a couple bottles of champagne. Shit got weird and she called her husband for a ride home about 2am.
Ampersand is such a fun word
I’d argue that “and” is the proper way to say “&” in english, even though it’s just a fancy “et”. The word ampersand is just a weird spelling of “and per se and”, that is, “and in itself”, as opposed to being part of listing things. Like: x,y,z, and &. The first and is just part of the grammar of listing things, the second is an item in that list.
Contemporary to hashtags being invented on Twitter was the use of tags to categorize blog posts. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy
Also, note that hashtags on Twitter started as a grassroots convention before it was supported as an official feature.
On a Touch Tone phone, this is called the Pound Sign (US).
It’s a sh, as in #!/
#!is “hash bang” so still hashI have always called that shebang.
Fascinating. The wikipedia page is for
shebangso clearly you are right.But the wikipedia page also cites it being called
hashbang– citing mostly o’reilly books.Now I’m intrigued, not that I have a lot of reason to talk about shell scripts, but I had never heard it called any other way.
TIL, thanks!
In college we were taught “hash exclamation, aka hash bang or shebang for short”.
I do un*x shell since the 90s, before linux, maybe this is why I have always called it that way
“#!” was also used as shorthand for “crunchbang linux”.
The world (or at least the Anglosphere) has always called the # symbol the hash sign. I have no idea why Americans called it the pound sign - most places call the £ symbol the pound sign.
The term “hashtag” was not invented by an American. For the rest of us this makes sense - it’s a tag denoted by a hash sign - but I can see how it seemingly came out of nowhere if you used different words.
I have no idea why Americans called it the pound sign
In the old days, they called it a pound sign and actually used it to mean “pounds” as in weight. In a grocery store there might be a sign reading something like “10# bag Potatoes $1”.
I always read this as hash until I learn that the programming language C# is pronounced C sharp
Centuries of music has entered the chat
In music, # denotes a sharp key or note and b denotes a flat key or note — this is Italian notation.
Traditionally in English, the # symbol was called the hash, because it looked like the end of a cooking implement used to hash vegetables (nowadays everyone would say mash instead).
In US typewriters, there was no £ symbol, so # was used to denote british pounds instead.
When the telephone button pad was created, there was room for two more symbols and tones, so the creators took the asterisk and hash from the typewriter and added them as extra signals.
When Twitter needed a way to denote a tagged word in a tweet, they decided to use the hash symbol.
I don’t know if this is a new development to differentiate or just a style thing. But I think sharp in music is usually slanted up ♯. Rather than horizontal #.
C# in computers is just perverse.
It’s the same with flats being ♭ and not b. Mostly an engraving choice.
Yes, probably just style then. Thinking about the context it has to be angled one way or another in sheet music just for clarity against the lines of the staff.
It’d be interesting to know whether it was used first in sheet music, or otherwise.
There may not be stupid questions, but this thread proves that there are certainly stupid answers.
