This Week’s Fun & Fancy Word: Octothorpe!
This Week’s Fun & Fancy Word Is:
It’s a pretty sure bet that you call one of these a hashtag. Your mom probably calls it a pound sign. Or uses it as an abbreviation for the word “number.”
Musicians recognize them as the sharp symbol on sheet music. Copy editors use them to mean “space” – “add a space between these two sentences,” for example. And in computer code, it indicates that everything after it is only comment, not instruction. But however you use it, octothorpe is the name for this symbol: #.
Etymology:
Origin of Octothorpe
The word is said to have been invented in Bell Laboratories – you know, where the telephone came from. In the early 1960s the scientists there modified the telephone keypad, adding the # symbol to send instructions to the telephone operating system.
Since the # symbol didn’t have a name, they gave it one. They decided it should be called octo- something because it has eight points. But it’s uncertain how things proceeded from there.
According to one report, it was named after the Native-American Olympian Jim Thorpe. Another unverifiable report asserts that “thorpe” refers to the Old Norse word for “farm or field.” In which case, octothorpe means “eight fields.”
Then there’s the downright silly claim that one of the Bell Labs employees burped while talking about the symbol, and that version of the word stuck.[1]
Find A Caboodle
Of Fun & Fancy Words Here.
Endnotes:
[1]“Octothorpe.” Dictionary.com https://www.dictionary.com/articles/octothorpe
“Octothorpe: the many names of the # symbol.” March 25, 2026. https://www.englishgrammar.org/octothorpe-names-symbol/
Eldridge, Stephen. “Number sign.” Britannica.https://www.britannica.com/topic/number-sign
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