OK this entry is one for the geeks. What do you call the # symbol? I call it “hash”, always have. I’ve heard it called “cross-hatch” which I can accept, but I prefer “hash”. According to some websites “octothorpe” is the correct name. The less said about that the better. British phone people seem to call it “square” which is wrong, but you can see it from the point of view of the phone user-interface. You don’t want your automated ticket booking system saying “please enter your credit card number then press octothorpe. If you don’t know what octothorpe is, please press asterisk for an explanation”… so “square” and “star” win there.

Americans call it “pound”. WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG!

Here’s my (largely correct :-) ) theory why:

In the ’70s bits were expensive. A bit is a binary digit. Every time you add a bit, you can represent twice as many symbols but you have to add a LOT of wire. Bug me for a tutorial on this if you’re interested, it’s a fun subject to try to explain in layman’s terms. Anyhow. People figured 7 bits of information were enough to represent everything you needed to know - all the letters, digits, punctuation and other squiggles, plus helpful technical symbols like “End of Transmission” “Acknowledge” etc. They came up with and published a ‘character set‘ that they thought reasonable. This was called ASCII (american standard code for information interchange) and was a Good Thing. Of course, this was done in the US, and characters like ö, å, ¥ etc. were not thought important at the time.

In Britain, there was one very important character that wasn’t in ASCII. That was £. UK computer users had a few choices. You couldn’t just add £ to the existing set without modifying every computer in the country, and every computer, printer, and network you wanted to talk to… It was a lot cheaper to simply have a local dialect of ASCII that included this important character. It would also be handy if it was in a sensible place on the keyboard. I guess $ was too important to throw away, so they ended up taking character 33, which had the little-used symbol # attached to it, and putting £ in its place.

So it went on, right through the 80’s, this mostly worked. If you’d told your computer it was british, then opened a file from another such computer, you’d see that a few hundred shares in Sinclair Research has shifted for £10 each recently. Someone had typed £10, the computer faithfully stored 33, 49, 48 on the floppy, and your computer looked it up in the ASCII table and showed you £10. You printed it off and got #10. Why? Cos the printer didn’t know it was British. It knew character 33 as #.

So if you’re in America in the ’80s and you want to buy something from the UK, the conversation goes something like this…

(US)how much are SR shares? -> (UK)how much are SR shares?
(UK)£10 each. at current exchange rates £1=$4.33 -> (US)#10 each. at current exchange rates #1=$4.33

So that, lady geeks and gentleman geeks, is why I believe these people call ‘#’ pound.