We always called the # symbol ‘number sign’. ‘Pound sign’ even now makes me think of the £ symbol, even though we do not have that on our English-language keyboards (which tend to be US-standard by default).
I am convinced that the ‘pound’ usage has crept in because of US-manufactured phone-answering systems that tell the listener to ‘press the pound key’: it’s a one-syllable word that matches ‘star’ for * in brevity. I’ve never heard anyone local use ‘pound’ for # outside that context.
Originally, I believe that the pound sterling was an actual troy pound of silver. Of course, this was hundreds of years ago, in the days when the major circulating coin of England was the silver penny (which was 1/240 pf a troy pound of silver).
(That last one is a particularly treacherous pun: Nathan Hale famously said “I regret I have only one life to give for my country.” ‘Life to give’ is ‘Ass to risk’, which is asterisk.)
I would gladly listen to people call it a star if that meant I didn’t have to hear just about everyone call it an asterik. AAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!
In HS typing class (1967) we learned that #4 is number four, but 4# is four pounds. It depends on the position. Even then, it wasn’t used often for pounds.
I regret that I have but one asterisk for my country.
Interestingly enough, “octothorpe” is a term invented by the phone company[sup][/sup] to refer to the symbol precisely because of the confusion over the symbol’s name. The etymology of the term is in dispute and may never be known - a good overview can be found here.
[sup][/sup]Bell Labs, part of the Bell Telephone company, which ultimately achieved monopoly status in the US, before being broken up, and whose descendants have now formed another near-monopoly.
To my mind, that account puts the cart before the horse WRT to another part of the story. DTMF (touch tone) usage as originally conceived didn’t need the two extra keys. However, since the tones consisted of 1 of 4 low frequencies, plus 1 of 3 high frequencies, there were two leftover combinations. They realized that it would probably be useful to put them on the handset for future data entry applications. It was several years before they were commonly used for anything. Bell Labs undertook studies of characters used for various purposes to decide which characters should be displayed on them, and came up with * and #.
Actually, the original DTMF spec included 16 combinations with an extra high frequency used for the now-defunct Autovon system used by the US Military. There were 4 more keys on the pad, intended for 4 levels of priority override in making calls.
As noted in the wiki article, studies were also undertaken to arrive at the keypad layout:
I assume that this has caused confusion too, seeing as to most francophones, the term “virgule” means “,” (a comma) and is used both in writing as we do in English, but also to denote the decimal point in numbers “2,657” meaning "2.657 ("two-point-six-five-seven) rather than two thousand six hundred and fifty seven.
“/” to me is a slash, while “” is a backslash. In what domain is “/” called a virgule?
From following the Wikipedia trail I learned that the pound as an Old English unit of mass was originally defined as a given number of grains. Picture a sack containing 7,000 grains of barley. There you got one pound of barley. That’s what a pound originally was. There were various pound measures in history; the avoirdupois pound still in use has 7,000 grains. One historical oddity I read about was the “wool pound” used for weighing wool in medieval England. It has only 6,992 grains. How on earth did they decide that wool should be a pound minus the weight of 8 barleycorns? All I can guess is that measures were not universally standardized in the old days. There were variations from place to place. The avoirdupois pound from France must have had its standard weights maintained in Paris. The pound weights they used in England at the Wool Merchants Hall or whatever maybe had a few grains fall out of the sack on the way to London.
“You’ve reached the voicemail of Jodi Lastname. Please leave a message. If you would like more personal assistance, please press octothorpe.” :dubious:
