Corpora: "hash" (was "at sign")

[Geoffrey Sampson]

I am pretty sure the reason for calling the # sign "pound" is that its
graphic "etymology" was the letters lb with a horizontal line ligaturing
them together, lb being the standard abbreviation for "pound", from
Latin "librum" ("libra"?  I can't remember the gender).  In my lifetime
in Britain, until recently when the ayatollahs of Brussels set about
banning our weights and measures, we didn't use a special symbol to
abbreviate "pound weight" but just typed/printed the ordinary "lb" letters;
but in old documents I have seen "lb" with a cross line printed as a
special "sort", as printers would call it, and I believe that is the
symbol from which "#" developed in the USA.  I think too (but now things
are getting a bit mistier) that Americans at one stage wrote "#5" to
mean "five pounds weight", rather than, as they now do, "number 5".

I am probably a little older than Harold Somers (born 1944), and consequently
I wasn't "confused as a kid" by seeing # to mean "number", because in
Britain in the 1950s and 1960s this symbol was completely unknown -- it wasn't
like the dollar sign which we all knew about but had no occasion to use,
I don't think most of us even were aware that Americans had this symbol,
for any purpose.  I encountered it when I went to the USA in the mid-1960s,
but I think many Britons first met it when computers became widespread
in the early 1980s.  I remember the secretaries at the university department
where I worked in the late 1980s called it "gate", which seemed to me a good
name for it -- I'm not sure how common that name was, it seems now to have
been replaced by "hash".

The musical sharp symbol is very similar but I think is usually written
slightly differently, for instance the verticals have to be vertical, and
their tops and bottoms are not necessarily aligned horizontally.


G.R. Sampson, Professor of Natural Language Computing

School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, GB

e-mail geoffs at cogs.susx.ac.uk
tel. +44 1273 678525
fax  +44 1273 671320
web http://www.grsampson.net