Number sign

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Punctuation

Number sign is the preferred Unicode name for the glyph or symbol # (not to be confused with sharp ♯). The name was chosen from several used in the United States and Canada. In most other English-speaking countries, it is called a hash. The sign's Unicode code point is U+0023 and its ASCII value is hexadecimal 23. On a UK keyboard, it has its own key just to the left of "Enter" and on a U.S. keyboard, it can be typed using Shift-3 (on a UK keyboard, this is the key combination for the pound sign).

In many parts of the world, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Russia and the rest of Europe the name is used for the sign "№", which is Unicode U+2116 and does not appear in ASCII. It is often written simply as No. or using a superscript N^o. Unicode calls this sign the Numero sign to avoid confusion. Note that in these contexts, the # sign is not used to indicate a number or numerical value.

[edit] Naming convention within the USA

In the United States, the symbol was traditionally called the pound sign. This derives from a series of abbreviations for pound avoirdupois, which is a unit of mass (although pound is generally used as a unit of weight; for more information, see pound-force and pound (unit of mass)). At first "lb." was used; later, printers got a special font made up of an "lb" with a line through the ascenders so that the "l" would not be mistaken for a "1". Unicode character U+2114 (℔) is called the "LB Bar Symbol," and it is a cursive development of this symbol. Finally came the reduction to two horizontal and two vertical strokes.

Its traditional commercial use in the U.S. was such that when it followed a number, it was to be read as "pounds", as in 5# of sugar, and when it preceded a number, it was to be read as 'number', as in #2 pencil. Thus the same character in a printer's type case had two uses.

[edit] Names in English speaking countries apart from the USA

It has many other names (and uses) in English. (Those in bold are listed as alternative names in the Unicode documentation.)

• comment sign
  • from its use in many shell scripts and some programming languages like Perl to introduce comment text
• crosshatch
  • resemblance
• crunch
  • possibly used by computer programmers, as parallel to ! (exclamation mark), which programmers often call "bang". These two characters are used together in shell scripts. The parallelism stems from cosmological physics, which posits that the universe began in a "big bang" and may end in a "big crunch".
• fence, gate, grid, gridlet
  • resemblance
• hash / hash mark / hash sign
  • the most common name outside the U.S., including in the Ireland, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
    • this is the name used by Irish and UK computer professionals.
  • Used in Ireland, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand on touch-tone telephones – "Please press the hash key"
  • In the UK and Australia the symbol is often used as medical shorthand for 'fracture' [1][2]
  • In UNIX shell and Perl scripting, it's used in combination with an exclamation mark to produce "#!" or "hash-bang," used to tell the OS which program to use to run the script.
• hex
  • from its use to denote hexadecimal values in some markup and programming languages
• mesh
  • introduced in the tonsil of the Intercal reference manual, and often reproduced in The Hacker's Dictionary
• octothorn
  • William Sherk in 500 Years of New Words (1983), p. 272, has the following entry: "Octothorn, The number sign (#); so called because there are eight points, or thorns, sticking out of it ..."
• octalthorpe / octothorp / octothorpe / octatherp
  • See wiktionary:Octothorpe for etymology. With some detail at www.octothorp.us.
  • See http://doug.kerr.home.att.net/pumpkin/index.htm#Octatherp for detailed alternate etymology.
  • The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, 1991, has a long article that's consistent with Doug Kerr's essay, in that it says octotherp was the original spelling, and that the word arose in the 1960s among telephone engineers.
  • http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-oct1.htm tells of three possible etymologies, none likely, and says it wasn't in print until 1974, so the Merriam-Webster story that says it appeared in the 1960s may be more credible.
• pig pen
  • resemblance
• pound / pound sign
  • Used as the symbol for the pound (the unit of mass) in the U.S. (where lb. would be used in the UK and Canada; note that lb. or lbs. is common in the U.S. as well and is used by the general public more often than #). It is never called the pound sign in the UK, where that term always denotes the symbol for pounds sterling (£) rather than that for pounds weight (lb).
    • Keith Gordon Irwin in, The Romance of Writing, p. 125 says: "The Italian libbra (from the old Latin word libra, 'balance') represented a weight almost exactly equal to the avoirdupois pound of England. The Italian abbreviation of lb with a line drawn across the letters was used for both weights. The business clerks' hurried way of writing the abbreviation appears to have been responsible for the # sign used for pound."
  • Used in the U.S. and Canada on touch-tone telephones – "Please press the pound key"
• sharp
  • resemblance to the glyph used in music notation. Since most fonts don't contain the sharp sign most websites will doubtless continue to use the fallback hash mark. The music sharp sign, which should be used if available, is U+266F (♯).
  • so called in the name of the Microsoft-invented programming language, C#. However Microsoft says at Frequently Asked Questions About C#:
    It's not the "hash" (or pound) symbol as most people believe. It's actually supposed to be the musical sharp symbol. However, because the sharp symbol is not present on the standard keyboard, it's easier to type the hash ("#") symbol. The name of the language is, of course, pronounced "see sharp".
    According to the ECMA-334 C# Language Specification, section 6, Acronyms and abbreviations, the name of the language is written "C#" ("LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C (U+0043) followed by the NUMBER SIGN # (U+0023)") and pronounced "C Sharp".
  • In computing a shebang is the inexact contraction of sharp and bang the typical names of the # and ! signs used at the beginning of executable text files.
• space sign
  • used by editors to indicate where space should be inserted in a proof. This can mean (1) a line space (the space between two adjacent lines denoted by line # in the margin), (2) a hair space (the space between two letters in a word, denoted by hr #) (3) a word space, or letter space (the space between two words on a line, two letter spaces being ##). Em- and en-spaces (being the length of a letter m and n, respectively) are indicated by a square-shaped em- or en-quad character (  and  ̷, respectively).
• splat
  • colloquial term referring to vague resemblance of # to a squashed spider
  • sometimes used for the asterisk (*), for the same reason
  • sometimes used for the cloverleaf-like Command key on keyboards for Apple Macintosh computer keyboards
• square
  • occasionally used in the UK (e.g. sometimes in BT publications and automatic messages) - especially during the Prestel era, when the symbol was a page address delimiter
  • the International Telecommunications Union specification ITU-T E.161 3.2.2 states: "The # is to be known as a 'square' or the most commonly used equivalent term in other languages."
• widget mark

[edit] Other uses

In a URL the sign is used immediately after the URL of a webpage or other resource to introduce a "fragment identifier" — a name or id which defines a position within that resource or a section of the document. For example, in the URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign#In_other_languages the portion after the # (In_other_languages)is the fragment identifier (a link such as this will take you to a section in a web page, such as the 'In other languages' section of this article). A relative reference to the fragment from within the document itself can start with the number sign, and consist of just the fragment identifier: <a href="#top">TOC</a> refers to an anchor named "top" on the current web page. [3]

In the C programming language, the sign is used to introduce preprocessor directives.

[edit] In other languages

• Arabic: "مربع", pronounced "morabaa" (square)
• Basque: Traol
• Bulgarian: диез, pronounced dies
• Catalan: Coixinet
• Chinese: "井號" (jǐng hào; literally: "well" sign) as it resembles the hanzi for water well, 井; jǐng
• Czech: mřížka (small grid or small bar)
• Danish: firkant (tetragon, i.e. square), the official name used by telcos for touch-tone key, or havelåge (garden gate from the gate in a picket fence)
• Dutch: hekje (picket fence), spoorwegovergang (railroad crossing)
• Estonian: trellid (grate)
• Finnish: ruutu (square) or risuaita (brushwood fence)
• French: dièse (sharp sign) || Note: in Québec and Benelux it is called carré (=square)
• German: Raute or Rautenzeichen (Rhombus, the official name used by telcos for the touch-tone key), Lattenzaun (picket fence), Doppelkreuz (double cross), Gatter (gate)
• Greek: δίεση (diesis)
• Hebrew: סוּלָמִית, pronounced sulamit (from sulam == "ladder" + -it, feminine ending)
• Hungarian: kettőskereszt (double cross)
• Italian: cancelletto (small gate)
• Japanese: "番号記号" (bangōkigō, "number sign"); "井桁" (igeta, literally the rim of a well, which is traditionally this shape) or "シャープ" (sharp in katakana)
• Latvian: restīte [IPA: restiːte] (little grid)
• Norwegian: firkant (tetragon, i.e. square) or (sometimes) skigard (A particular kind of fence with a visual resemblance)
• Persian: "چهارگوش" (Four-Corner) pronounced "Chaa'haa'r Goo'sh"
• Polish: kratka, krzyżyk (sharp sign), hash
• Portuguese: cardinal, used in mathematics notation to represent the cardinality of a set, sustenido ("sharp sign"), jogo-da-velha ("tic-tac-toe"). Also known as "cerquilha" in Brazil. because it resembles a picket fence (cerca).
• Romanian: diez ("sharp sign")
• Russian: решётка (reshëtka), pronounced rye-SHOT-ka (grid)
• Serbian: taraba (fence)
• Slovak: mriežka ("small grid")
• Slovenian: lojtra (the official name used by telcos for the touch-tone key, a colloquial term for ladder)
• Spanish: numeral, cuadradillo, almohadilla ("cushion"), sostenido ("sharp sign"), michi, gato, tatetí (the last three meaning "tic-tac-toe")
• Swedish: stakettecken (fence sign), "staket" (fence), "galler" ("grid, grating") fyrkant (square), ruta ('square, box') or brädgård (timberyard)
• Swiss German: Gartehag (fence)
• Thai: เครื่องหมายสี่เหลี่ยม (square sign, only used in telephone service)
• Turkish: Sayı işareti

[edit] See also

• Numero sign

[edit] References (as numbered above)

de:Rautenzeichen eu:Traol fr:Croisillon he:סולמית nl:Kardinaalteken ja:番号記号 pl:Kratka (znak) pt:Cerquilha ru:Октоторп fi:Numeron merkki sv:Nummertecken zh:井號