March 15, 2023: It's Not a Sharp Sign - Those Are Tilted Upwards!

Winter term is nearly over, so I’m sharing some more amaze-your-friends factoids, before the well runs dry. 

What do you call this symbol?

I called it the “pound sign” for a while, and I believe I heard that in in instructions to enter a number and then “press pound.”  Before that, I guess I would have called it the number sign, and I still USE it that way, as in “reason #3 was….” More recently, I’m likely to call it a hashtag, and it also shows up in image searches as the “hash sign.”   

But it has another name! It is the “octothorp.”

Honest. Here’s the Oxford English Dictionary definition.  Up in the Etymology section, they guess that perhaps the word combines “octo” with the surname “Thorpe.” Down in the 1996 quotation from the New Scientist, it’s suggested that the shape was “playfully construed as eight fields surrounding a village,” since “thorp” was an Old English word for village. It does have eight points....

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octothorp, n.

Forms:  1900s– octothorp, 1900s– octothorpe.

Origin: Of uncertain origin. Perhaps from a proper name, combined with an English element. 

Etymology: Origin uncertain; perhaps < octo- comb. form + the surname Thorpe 

Telephony (originally North American).

The hash sign (#), as it appears on the buttons of touch-tone telephones and some other keypads.

Quotes:

1973   U.S. Patent 3,920,926   The pad provides keys for numerals 0 to 9, while..the octothorp (#) key generates a command to send the contents of the memory into the telephone line.

1996   New Scientist 30 Mar. 54/3   The term ‘octothorp(e)’ (which MWCD10 dates 1971) was invented for ‘#’, allegedly by Bell Labs engineers when touch-tone telephones were introduced in the mid-1960s. ‘Octo-’ means eight, and ‘thorp’ was an Old English word for village: apparently the sign was playfully construed as eight fields surrounding a village.

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The question remains why it needed a special name when it had so many other names already, but apparently the folks at Bell Labs who were working on touch-tone telephones wanted something catchy. They didn’t succeed, but they gave it a try: let’s grab a prefix we borrowed from Greek and Latin, and smoosh it together with “thorp!” (The OED says “thorp” might have had a Norse influence. I buy that. Still not catchy.)

I think the reporter for New Scientist should have tried harder to find Bell Labs telephony people from the 1960s, so we wouldn’t be stuck with that whole “allegedly” explanation. Too late now. Sigh.

Anyway.

Moving back to more elegant derivations, I bring you “oviparous,” our word of the day. Turtles are oviparous. So are ostriches.

I learned this by admiring the same wall where last week Rosa Parks and George Washington Carver were featured. “Oviparous” means “reproducing by means of an egg.”   Someday I hope to meet this particular teacher. I think I will really like her.