Antedating of "hashtag"

[Ben Zimmer]

The Wikipedia entry should be updated. I found out about Stowe Boyd's
8/25/07 Twitter post in Feb. 2013, about a month after the WOTY vote:

https://twitter.com/bgzimmer/status/299970511411216384

I made sure the tweet was the first citation in our "Among the New Words"
treatment of "hashtag" in the Spring 2013 issue of AmSp:

http://bit.ly/ATNW88-1

Stowe Boyd himself quoted the ATNW intro on his blog:

http://stoweboyd.com/post/52447334415/the-first-time-i-saw-a-hashtag

--bgz




On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 4:22 PM, Hugo <hugovk at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Hugo <hugovk at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Antedating of "hashtag"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Not in OED.
>
> Wikipedia says:
>
> [Begin]
> The first use of the term "hash tag" was in a blog post by Stowe Boyd,
> "Hash Tags = Twitter Groupings,"[8] on 26 August 2007, according to
> lexicographer Ben Zimmer, chair of the American Dialect Society's New
> Words Committee.
>
> ...
>
> [8] "Stowe Boyd, Hash Tags = Twitter Groupings". Stoweboyd.com.
> Retrieved 2013-09-19.
> http://stoweboyd.com/post/39877198249/hash-tags-twitter-groupings
> [End]
>
> I found an earlier example. Only by a single day, and by the same
> person, but still. Here it is, with both "hash tag" and "#hashtag":
>
> [Begin]
> I support the hash tag convention: http://tinyurl.com/2qttlb #hashtag
> #factoryjoe #twitter
> [End]
>
> Stowe Boyd, @stoweboyd
> 3:36 PM - 25 Aug 2007
> https://twitter.com/stoweboyd/status/226570552
>
> The referenced 25 Aug 2007 blogpost doesn't actually use an explicit
> "hash tag" or "hashtag" but concludes:
>
> [Begin]
> Anyway... I support the #tag convention.
> [End]
>
> http://stoweboyd.com/post/971380334/chris-messina-on-twitter-tags
>
> http://wayback.archive.org/web/20101204010349/http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/971380334/chris-messina-on-twitter-tags
>
> Hugo
>
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>



--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org