Happy Birthday Hashtag.
The symbol’s now been in use for ten years on Twitter. It’s changed the way we communicate online a lot, allowing us to condense complex messages into simple phrases, and has now spread beyond Twitter. It only took me about nine of those ten years to figure out how to use them. And even now I’m not entirely convinced I’m doing it right.
The name is an interesting one. The tag presumably comes from the world of graffiti, in which it refers to a stylized signature, this use in turn coming from the more traditional sense of tagging as in labelling.
The hash part is more curious, as most Americans will know this symbol as the number sign or pound sign. It’s long been known as the hash symbol in British English, a reference to the artistic technique of cross-hatching, which it resembles. Interestingly, pound has perhaps more historical weight, as it’s believed that the symbol is derived from ℔, the Roman symbol for a pound weight. The reason it’s not known as the pound sign in British English, is of course because of the existence of this pound sign: £.
Why use the British-English term in hashtag then? I think it’s simply because hashtag sounds much better than poundtag. If you want to be popular, you’ve got to sound good, and I’m sure that’s a large part of why hashtags have taken off.
#HappyBirthday hashtags!
Reblogged this on Claire Hillsmith and commented:
Because we all love a good hashtag!
LikeLiked by 1 person
I do like word hashtag it’s self, I think it sounds really good. It’s good to know a little bit of history behind it also. #awesomepost xx
LikeLiked by 1 person
Fun fact – I used to call hashtags “sharps” because they look like sharps in musical notation.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I never thought about that: I think it could take off!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Very interesting, always good to know a little bit more about something that you use alot!
LikeLike
#PassiveAggressiveComment 🙂
LikeLiked by 2 people
” Interestingly, pound has perhaps more historical weight,” #pun #iknowidontusethisrightandidontcare
#goodpost
LikeLiked by 1 person
That was honestly not intentional! 😁
LikeLiked by 1 person
#punningislife
LikeLiked by 1 person
[…] why it would become known as hash rather than a pound is strange for me with it being particularly English English rather than American English, but […]
LikeLike
[…] suppose it makes sense, having looked at Instagram and Twitter the last few days, to have a last look at the names of the other main social […]
LikeLike
“If you want to be popular, you’ve got to sound good.” Hahahaha! Love it!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Th other day I was using one of those American dial in conference call systems.
“Enter the code number….”
7868798065908098438 or whatever
“Enter the PIn followed by the £ sign”
4657 ……
£ sign???????
LikeLiked by 1 person
[…] Twitter again. Now we can compose tweets of 280 characters on Twitter, double the previous limit. And I have to ask: why? […]
LikeLike
[…] look around to see if there are any pre-existing words or phrases that will do the job. Fake news. Hashtag. Omnishambles. They’re all just repackaging old words and prefixes to meet the demand of new […]
LikeLike
[…] group knows the context, that we’re sharing each other’s posts, often via social media. Twitter is a handy way to share a post, and most of us have Twitter accounts. They also know that we reply […]
LikeLike
[…] you might not be aware of is that the pound sign (not this one, this one – £), has a similar origin. If you remove the horizontal stroke (which indicates […]
LikeLike