Articles and Stories

June 11, 2015

By Sabina Wrightsman

In the late 1980s, I started managing translations of telephone scripts. One of my first tasks was to cross check all numbers between the original language and the translation, the asterisk (*) and the pound key (#), to make sure that ‘press 1’ was really translated as ‘press 1’ and not accidentally as ‘press 7’.

Even though the beginning of the end for the rotary dial came in 1963, not many people switched over to a touch-tone keypad right away or knew about them. It took a while for everybody to understand the additional ‘star’ and the ‘pound’ key. At that time, telephone systems were popping up everywhere, often very complicated.

The new words ‘Asterisk’ or ‘Star’ were easy to understand for translators new to telephone systems, but the ‘pound’ key was more complicated. The funniest translations I remember were ‘the symbol on the left of the zero’, ‘crossed lines’ and ‘press three pounds’. To this day, checking the translation of the number key is important as some translations in rarer languages are still not familiar with them.

In the UK and Ireland, however, the word ‘hash’ was used. Some telephone scripts referred to ‘hash’ and not ‘pound’, which was even more obscure for many translators. By now, most people understand the word ‘hashtag’ due to the usage on Twitter.

The hashtag is actually a metatag used on Twitter and other social network sites to identify a topic or content of a post. Searching for that hashtag will then present each message that has been tagged with it.

The official name for ‘hash’ is ‘octothorpe’. Since the pound key or number sign did not have an official name, scientists in the Bell Laboratories came up with that word in the sixties. Because of the eight ends around the edges, ‘octo’ was easy to use but how do you make a noun out of it? Nobody is entirely sure how it happened, but the best explanation is that it comes from the old Norse word ‘thorpe’ which back translates into ‘farm’ or ‘field’, so, ‘octothorpe’ most likely means ‘eight fields’.

Since ‘hash’ or ‘hashtag’ is the same symbol and word as the pound sign, people are starting to also use it for phone systems now. The word ‘pound key’ might soon be gone from our daily use.