this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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I never understood why Americans call a ‘#’ a ‘pound sign’ but then if you put words in front of it, it suddenly becomes a ‘hashtag’. Shouldn’t it be a ‘poundtag’? I mean the rest of the Anglosphere refers to a ‘#’ as a ‘hash’ so it makes sense to us, but why do Americans call it a hashtag? Seems weird to me.
It's contextual. If it's used in a phone number, it's a pound sign. If it's placed before a number, it's a number sign. If it's placed before a tag, it's a hash/hashmark/hashtag.
No one would pronounce "#foo" as "pound foo" any more than they'd call a #2 pencil a "pound two pencil". Because "pound" is clearly not the right name in either context.
Americans have been comfortable using different names for the symbol in different contexts since long before hashtags even existed. So when websites started using them and referred to them as "hashtags", that was fine. It was a new context so it could use whichever name it wanted. (Well, "octothorpe-tag" is probably far too unwieldy to catch on.)
Of course if we're talking about the symbol without a specific context, then we have to pick one of the names. For most Americans, that "default" name is probably still "pound". Twenty years ago I'd definitely say that, but even then it wasn't ubiquitous. It wasn't uncommon to hear it referred to as a hash. And it seems like the use of "pound" has declined and the use of hash has increased as people now spend more time online and less time dialing phone numbers. There's also a generational divide with older people more likely to say "pound" and younger people more likely to say "hash".
It's because it comes from the lb pound symbol, which became ℔, which when written quickly and sloppily became a sort of hash symbol, and then it became the # symbol we know today. Pound is the more accurate name for the context it came from.
https://www.pixartprinting.co.uk/blog/hash-symbol-secrets/
Others have already answered better than I, but it's basically just a symbol to signify a weight, pound.
It was already repurposed to be a symbol for numbers, when they are part of a sentence, and now it's being repurposed even more so for the Internet.