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Concept
Number sign
Summary
The symbol is known variously in English-speaking regions as the number sign, hash, or pound sign. 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 .
Since 2007, widespread usage of the symbol to introduce metadata tags on social media platforms has led to such tags being known as "hashtags", and from that, the symbol itself is sometimes called a hashtag.
The symbol is distinguished from similar symbols by its combination of level horizontal strokes and right-tilting vertical strokes.
It is believed that the symbol traces its origins to the symbol , an abbreviation of the Roman term libra pondo, which translates as "pound weight". This abbreviation was printed with a dedicated ligature type element, with a horizontal line across, so that the lowercase letter would not be mistaken for the numeral . Ultimately, the symbol was reduced for clarity as an overlay of two horizontal strokes "=" across two slash-like strokes "//".
The symbol is described as the "number" character in an 1853 treatise on bookkeeping, and its double meaning is described in a bookkeeping text from 1880. The instruction manual of the Blickensderfer model 5 typewriter (1896) appears to refer to the symbol as the "number mark". Some early-20th-century U.S. sources refer to it as the "number sign", although this could also refer to the numero sign. A 1917 manual distinguishes between two uses of the sign: "number (written before a figure)" and "pounds (written after a figure)". The use of the phrase "pound sign" to refer to this symbol is found from 1932 in U.S. usage. The term hash sign is found in South African writings from the late 1960s and from other non-North-American sources in the 1970s.
The symbol appears to have been used primarily in handwritten material; in the printing business, the numero symbol () and barred-lb () were used for "number" and "pounds" respectively.
Official source
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