The symbol # is found in the lower right-hand corner of the telephone keypad. Known variously as the “number sign,” the “pound sign,” and the “sharp sign,” it actually has an official name: it is an OCTOTHORP.
Really.
I came across it ten or twelve years ago in a national Sunday newspaper magazine in a Trivia section, and I'm told it’s in the telephone company’s technical manual, too. It’s not in the OED. The nearest thing I’ve come upon is that “thorp” is a medieval word for a town, and that doesn’t have any obvious connection.
It's nowhere on the AWAD page, either, at least not that I can find. Edit 2/26/02: But "octothorpe" is, I find. YCLIU.
Harvard Magazine did a little column on the matter in 1977 or so, but didn't chase down its origin.
Can any of our members shed some light on the derivation of "octothorp"?
With eager anticipation,
wofahulicodoc
Seems one etymology of the octothorp has to do with the layout of towns where the eight plots surrounding the common area were populated.
“Otherwise known as the numeral sign. It has also been used as a symbol for the pound avoirdupois, but this usage is now archaic. In cartography, it is also a symbol for village: eight fields around a central square, and this is the source of its name. Octothorp means eight fields.”
http://www.brodynewmedia.com/Octothorp.html
From a Scientific American article
:
"Probably not, although the folks at Slashdot, an on-line hacker community, did have a lot to say about Microsoft naming its computing language C#--everyone will argue about how to say “#” (“pound”? “hash”? “octothorp”?), except for musicians, who will pronounce it correctly at first sight as “sharp.”
http://www.sciam.com/2000/1000issue/1000cyber.htmlMore useless info about '#' ....
In German they call this ol' boy a
Gartenzaun (a garden fence) or
Doppelkreuz (double cross).
Kreuz is fittingly the word for a sharp in musical notation too :-)
How funny... in Spanish we call this the "almohadilla", or "little pillow". I'd never questioned it before! And it's the "hash key" here in the UK as well.
Microsoft naming its computing language C#
C++? (Which really should be ++C but that's a whole nother rant.)
And, regarding "hash"; back in the heady days of computing in the '70s, when no one would ever need more than 4K, we called it "hatch"
# hatch
* splat
! bang
# hatch * splat ! bang
you forgot left-banana and right-banana
Rod
Ţorp is from a Nordic origin, but I think has a more general meaning than just ‘field’ – see this as an example of the kind I have come across:
thorp 'outlying farmstead or hamlet, dependent secondary settlement'http://ww.archipel.demon.co.uk/Tendring/names.htmlIt is in common use in areas of the north of England where the Vikings settled, passing into both place names and family names – e.g., Althorpe, Diana’s family vault, or Thorpe (English alleged cricketer).
USns din't never call em bananas (never knew when to stop spelling bananana); we jus called em parens.
Thorpe (English alleged cricketer).Then there's Jim Thorpe, the Native American/Indian athlete. A town in the Pocono Mountains of eastern PA was named after him in 1953.
http://www.visitjimthorpe.com/new/history.htm#Jim Thorpe Himself
There was a post a long time ago that quoted a AT&T researcher as saying that when the dial telephone was being developed, they needed a new symbol, and invented the name octothorp for it.
From
http://www.ablepanasonic.com/missoffirmus.html"Octothorpe" is one of many names for the # key - usually found below the 9 and to the right of 0 on a touch-tone phone. It's also called the tick-tack-toe sign, cross-hash, cross-hatch, enter, hash, number-sign, noughts-and-crosses, octothorp, pound, pound-sign and probably other things.
and its easy to see how thorp, when spelled with the throrn--Ţorp became Dorp in africaners.. i think of the movie The 39 steps-- in which a key to solving the mystery is a "a one shay dorp" (or a one horse town-- as it is translated in the movie.. though a shay and horse are not the same thing)
now days, we call such small hamlets a "one traffic light town" but CK seems to think such towns no longer exist.
For a URL to the Oliver Wendell Holmes poem "The Deacon's Masterpiece" (the one hoss shay)
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/holmes9.html
we call such small hamlets a "one traffic light town" but CK seems to think such towns no longer exist.
No stop lights in Trumbull's Corners! None in Newfield, either, now that I think about it.
In Indonesian it's tanda pagar, the fence sign.
Bingley
though a shay and horse are not the same thing says of troy.
Indeed they are not, but a "shay", in the Cockney cant, was a one-horse carriage or wagon - indeed, I think a corruption of "chaise."
and its easy to see how thorp, when spelled with the throrn--Ţorp became Dorp in africaners
No, thorp is common Germanic, meaning 'village': it existed in Old English as that and also metathesized to throp (in place names such as Winthrop, Adlestrop, and the Spencer pronunciation of Althorpe as Althrop). It also occurred in Old Norse, so Danish settlements in England used it.
th changed to d in the common ancestor of German and Dutch (and Afrikaans), after it had parted company with Old English: thus dorp. It's a sound change, nothing to do with the letter thorn. As you travel south from Holland across Germany you get further sound changes gradually coming in (the "Rhenish fan"). There's a line across Germany south of which the word is Dorf. These are of course common in Dutch and German place names.
Thanks for that, NicholasW - great amplification. So there is a direct linguistic link between say Dusseldorf and Althorpe?