This name is rarely used outside the United States, where the term pound sign is understood to mean the currency symbol £. Dialing instructions to an extension such as #77, for example, can be read as "pound seven seven". Pound sign or pound 'Pound sign' or 'pound' are the most common names used in the United States, where the '#' key on a phone is commonly referred to as the pound key or simply pound. American telephone equipment companies which serve Canadian callers often have an option in their programming to denote Canadian English, which in turn instructs the system to say number sign to callers instead of pound. Most common in Canada and the northeastern United States. Number sign 'Number sign' is the name chosen by the Unicode consortium. Although used initially and most popularly on Twitter, hashtag use has extended to other social media sites. This usage inspired Chris Messina to propose a similar system to be used on Twitter to tag topics of interest on the microblogging network this became known as a hashtag. It was adopted for use within internet relay chat ( IRC) networks circa 1988 to label groups and topics. One of the uses in computers was to label the following text as having a different interpretation (such as a command or a comment) from the rest of the text. The symbol was introduced on the bottom right button of touch-tone keypads in 1968, but that button was not extensively used until the advent of large-scale voicemail (PBX systems, etc.) in the early 1980s. It appeared in many of the early teleprinter codes and from there was copied to ASCII, which made it available on computers and thus caused many more uses to be found for the character. įor mechanical devices, the symbol appeared on the keyboard of the Remington Standard typewriter ( c. The symbol appears to have been used primarily in handwritten material in the printing business, the numero symbol (№) and barred-lb (℔) are used for "number" and "pounds" respectively. 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 use of the phrase "pound sign" to refer to this symbol is found from 1932 in U.S. A 1917 manual distinguishes between two uses of the sign: "number (written before a figure)" and "pounds (written after a figure)". sources refer to it as the "number sign", although this could also refer to the numero sign. 1896) appears to refer to the symbol as the "number mark". The instruction manual of the Blickensderfer model 5 typewriter ( c. 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. Ultimately, the symbol was reduced for clarity as an overlay of two horizontal strokes "=" across two slash-like strokes "//". This abbreviation was printed with a dedicated ligature type element, with a horizontal line across, so that the lowercase letter l would not be mistaken for the numeral 1. 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". The abbreviation written by Isaac Newton, showing the evolution from "℔" toward "#"
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