7 ms·

I wanna feel superior about how none of those television people knew how to pronounce @, but to be honest I didn't know that in 1995 either. To be fair, I was

• cyberferret 10y ago
  It's a bit like how a lot of people refer to '#' as 'hashtag' these days, without knowing about 'the pound symbol' or 'sharp' (if you are a musician). :)
  • daurnimator 10y ago
    or octothorp
  • aethertron 10y ago
    The symbol is named 'hash' in Britain.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  • justinlardinois 10y ago
    It's a different symbol than the sharp, and I don't blame anyone for not knowing it's rarely used for that purpose these days. I had a web design professor who said its "true" name was octothorpe, and while various sources confirm that, I've never heard anyone else call it that. Another student in the same class once called it the "tic tac toe symbol."
    • cyberferret 10y ago
      > It's a different symbol than the sharp Ok, the true pedants can tilt their head a little to see the difference between a # and a [Edit: Hmm it seems HN doesn't support pasting of extended characters such as the musical 'sharp'?!?]... I will have to change the pronunciation in my C# programming books to 'C-hash' instead of 'C-sharp'... :)
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      • ethanbond 10y ago
        I think you're missing the point. There's the shape and there's the symbol. An octagon is a shape. A stop sign is a symbol that happens to be an octagon. Inversely, an octagon in the context of street signs represents "stop." The octothorpe, used in music, represents "sharp." In front of a number it represents "pound." In front of a string on twitter it represents "hashtag." AFAIK the typographical/visual differences are basically irrelevant. It's just a different symbol with a different meaning in different contexts, all represented with the same shape.
        • jakobegger 10y ago
          In my opinion the sharp symbol is very different from the hash symbol #. If you argue that these two are the same symbol, then so would be "d" and "q".
          • tamana 10y ago
            You were correct before ASCII and English keyboards and Microsoft C# gave the # an expanded role out of convenience
          • dragonwriter 10y ago
            > In my opinion the sharp symbol is very different from the hash symbol #. Yes, the pound sign is different than the sharp symbol, just as single quotes are different than apostrophes, and guillemets are different than less-than and greater-than symbols, and the flat symbol is different than "b". Now, limitations of first common US typewriters and then the ASCII character set have led to conventions where some of these have been used in place of the other because the correct symbol wasn't available, but that's different than the symbols being the same, and in most modern contexts, the correct symbol is usually available.
        • Mtinie 10y ago
          - sharp [1] # ‎- octothorpe [2] Different symbols, though very similar. (Edit: So much so that the true sharp symbol apparently does not render correctly on HN) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_(music) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_(music) [2] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/octothorpe https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/octothorpe
    • geon 10y ago
      I used to call it "fence" (gärdsgård) in Swedish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundpole_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundpole_fence
  • Asooka 10y ago
    Pronouncing it as "pound" lends a whole new universe of meaning to many trending hashtags :)
  • nicky0 10y ago
    Where I'm from (UK) this has always been called the "hash" symbol. Although British Telecom voice prompts insisted on calling it the "square" key for a while.
    • Symbiote 10y ago
      "For drugs, press the hash key" To hash means to chop up, which is a possible origin. To [cross] hatch means to colour in a space with [crossed] parallel lines, which is also possible. (I know you know this. Others probably don't.)
      • nicky0 10y ago
        Corned Beef #.
  • ethanbond 10y ago
    It has always been called hash in some regions/contexts. I'm pretty sure the shape itself (i.e. regardless of context) is called an octothorpe. So no it's not at all like that.
  • SmellyGeekBoy 10y ago
    I never understood why it was known as a "pound sign" in America. Surely that would be "£" ? I think I have some Googling to do. :)
    • JoshTriplett 10y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign#Usage_in_North_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign#Usage_in_North_Ame... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound
  • Scarblac 10y ago
    "Pound symbol" always confuses me. £ is the symbol for Pound sterling, and on UK keyboards that's at the same place (shift-3) as the # is on the US keyboards that we use in the Netherlands. It's as if people who call # the pound sign are from the UK and typed shift-3 on someone else's keyboard without actually noticing what showed up on the screen.
    • JoshTriplett 10y ago
      '#', by the name "pound sign" and used after a number (like 12#), refers to pounds of weight, not pounds of currency.
      • david-given 10y ago
        Are you sure about that? Pounds weight has its own symbol, ℔ (U+2114, http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2114/index.htm http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2114/index.htm if HN won't show it). I've always known # as representing "number", which is why you see it in lists: #1, #2, #3 etc.
        • Symbiote 10y ago
          Draw ℔ very carelessly, and you end up with #. # is never, ever, ever called the "pound sign" in Britain or Ireland. That's always £.
        • ghaff 10y ago
          # after the number is widely understood to refer to pounds (as in weight) in the US. Not sure how common that use is these days but most people would understand what was meant if they saw it.
        • mikestew 10y ago
          Pounds weight has its own symbol, ℔ A symbol that, after many decades of living in the U. S., I'm seeing for the first time just today. In my experience, if it's not written as "lb." or "lbs.", a hash is often used: "#".
      • 10y ago
  • TorKlingberg 10y ago
    A problem with calling # a "pound sign" is that it's easily confused with £.
  • c3833174 10y ago
    Aka small gate
  • poof_he_is_gone 10y ago
    There is a podcast on the origin of the octothorpe name http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/octothorpe/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/octothorpe/
  • tamana 10y ago
    It's a hash, not a hashtag. The hashtag is the # plus a "tag" word. When someone says "hashtag foo", they went spelling it out # + foo, they are saying "this is a hashtag, not a regular word in my setencen; the tag is foo" and the # is silent. #prescriptivism.
• Swizec 10y ago
  1995 was such a weird year. My biggest dream was to have a computer at home. Didn't even know yet that internet was a thing that existed. Then around 1997, the internet was something that you went to the library to use. And we finally had a computer at home. I remember how long it took us to figure out that the mouse tail should point up, not down.
  • icantdrive55 10y ago
    I really never thought they would take off. I did buy an Atari 2500St for college, and didn't tell anyone. I felt like I was cheating. While all the other students were griping about typing, or paying a typist; I just hit print. My girlfrined in college hated the "thing". Yes--she called it the "thing". "Leave that thing alone." She is now a millionaire, and head of technology at some company. After college, I bought a small electronic typewritter, that did word processing. I hated everything about computing, besides word processing, and didn't see the need for a computer if I wasen't in school. Plus, I tried programming, and I Knew I didn't want to spend my life in front of a screen, for anyone, for any amout of money. I hated those 500 page computer programming phone books. I just hated computing on so many levels, it's ironic now. I honesly didn't get the magic in programming until later on--a lot later on. Well that Atari went right into the garbage in the 90's. Yes--ouch! I so wish I had it now. I don't think people realize, in the 90's, it was really a gamble if the average person would buy a computer, even a GUI based system. Some people just hated everything about them. They were just so unsexy. So dry to many of us. So boring. So tedious, and never seemed to just work. I had a friend remind me in the 90's computing is an art too. He is now a multimillionaire. We worked at a chit job, and his friend's said, "My dad is willing to invest in a gaming company for us. Do you want to join?" He did have to think about it. In a few years he was set for life. He didn't ask me to join them, but I probally would have turned the offer down. I idnt get games, nor did I think the business would last more than a few months. Awe--again, so wrong! My mom was one of the first to buy a used blue Mac, and she loved every thing about it. It was then, I knew they would be big, and I was so wrong. I figured if she was willing to try them, they are making strides, at least Apple. I still didn't find the magic in computing/programming until about 15 years ago--sadly.
• mhd 10y ago
  I can't quite remember when we Germans transitioned from "Klammeraffe" (lit. "spider monkey") to "at" when spelling out email addresses...
  • elthran 10y ago
    As a non-German: Please do explain the etymology here
    • 205guy 10y ago
      The at symbol looks like it has a long tail wrapping around over its head, like a spider monkey sometimes sits.
    • dagw 10y ago
      I'm guessing it's because spider monkys have long curling tails that look a bit like an @ if you squint: http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/kids/photos/animals/Mammals/Q-Z/spider-monkey-walking-23878235.jpg http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/kids/photos/a...
    • mhd 10y ago
      The circle bit looks like a monkey tail, simple as that. And there was no need for a shorter word, as it really wasn't used in common speech or writing (the French "à" was/is used in the commercial sense).
    • kriro 10y ago
      I can only speculate but I believe it is due to the fact that it kind of looks like a paper clip shaped like a monkey ear (speculation on my part but I've heard that before). Klammer is short for Büroklammer (= paper clip) and Affe is monkey (or ape).
    • usrusr 10y ago
      My guess used to be that it started as a "Klammer-A" ("a in a bracket") and that at some point the joking extension from A to Affe (monkey or ape, everyday German does not make a distinction) went viral, supported by the tail-like shape. Now that I know that the monkey connection even exists in languages without the a -> Affe link I'm not so confident anymore.
• Leynos 10y ago
  It used to be fairly common in manufacturing and retail, where you might have a line on an invoice stating: 12 widgets @ £12ea Having seen that usage (coming from a family that ran a small business), the email address notation made sense straight away. On the other hand, I probably pronounced the dot in ".com" as "point" at least once, before hearing it read aloud by someone else.