• Today@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    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.

      • Today@lemmy.world
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        17 days ago

        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.

      • Lemming421@lemmy.world
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        17 days ago

        I am happy to finally learn the actual name of the symbol and simultaneously sad to learn it’s not called the ampers_at_

        • bisby@lemmy.world
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          18 days ago

          Fascinating. The wikipedia page is for shebang so 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!

          • khannie@lemmy.world
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            18 days ago

            In college we were taught “hash exclamation, aka hash bang or shebang for short”.

          • Magister@lemmy.world
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            17 days ago

            I do un*x shell since the 90s, before linux, maybe this is why I have always called it that way

  • amio@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    The term was popularized with Twitter but tags for search purposes etc had been a thing for a long time before then.

  • Apepollo11@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    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.

    • axh@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      I always read this as hash until I learn that the programming language C# is pronounced C sharp

      • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
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        18 days ago

        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.

    • leadore@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      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”.

  • stolig@lemmy.world
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    13 days ago

    Funny how # is used in some programming/scripting languages to ignore stuff…but on twitter to pay attention to stuff

  • Magister@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    In France it was “dièse” (like “sharp” in music) and it became hashtag too. In Québec it’s the “carré” meaning the square, and people says hashtag now too.

  • FaygoRedPop@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    There may not be stupid questions, but this thread proves that there are certainly stupid answers.

  • TrackinDaKraken@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    This was a joke question. The definition of “pound” as used in the context of OP’s question is newer than the definition of “#” as “hash”.