Grammar Girl: For Writers and Language Lovers. The history of the octothorpe. Sir Fragalot and sentence fragments. Dribzle.
Mar 3, 2026
A playful dive into how the # symbol gained its many names and a few rival origin tales. A whimsical character, Sir Fragalot, helps explain why sentence fragments happen. Practical quick tests for spotting fragments are offered. A family word, dribzle, gets a charming story about how household language sticks.
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How The Pound Abbreviation Became The Octothorpe
- The octothorpe evolved from the Roman abbreviation for pound, LB, which scribes marked with a bar that gradually fused into a crosshatched symbol.
- Bell Labs reused that symbol for touch-tone phones in the 1960s, adding asterisks and the hash key to balance the keypad layout, which cemented its modern role.
Why The Symbol Has So Many Names
- The same crosshatched symbol has many names worldwide: pound or number in North America, hash in Britain, hekja in the Netherlands, hex in Malaysia, and hashtag online.
- 'Hashtag' technically means the symbol plus a keyword and only popularized after Chris Messina's 2007 Twitter suggestion.
Bell Labs' Playful Naming Of Octothorpe
- Multiple origin stories exist for the word octothorpe, including Don McPherson allegedly honoring Jim Thorpe and Bell Labs engineers inventing a jokey term octotherp during lunch.
- Merriam-Webster records usage by 1971 and the term appears in a 1973 U.S. patent, showing informal naming became official quickly.