Well – this four little lines, one over other # is very famous now a days. It is widely used in social media to represent a cause and even big movements were trigerred after pre-fixing the consdensed summry with #. Anyone ever care to think – what is this symbol known as? Well, the answer may be easy. Hash Tag as it is popularly known as and some people may say that it is also known as Pound Sign / Number Sign or even hex (Mainly in Singapore and Malaysia).
Well – regretfully all these informations are wrong. There is a name of this symbol though it’s origins are still shrounded in mystery. # got legitimate name and it is Octothorpe.
Where is it used
There are a variety of uses for octathorpe and a few are
> When prefixed with a number, it is read as Number. A #2 pencil is read as A number 2 pencil
> If suffixed with a nuber, it is read as pound. A 5# bag is read as A 5 Pound bag. Hence, it is used as another abbreviation of ‘lb.’ and ‘℔’. But it is not a replacement for ‘£’.
> It has got a wide range of application in Medical Shorthand. It is used to indicate Bone Fracture Fore example,
# NOF means fractured neck of femur.
> It’s widely used in computing as part of various computer languages etc.
> Hashtag activism is a term coined by media outlets maintly to indicate the hashtag activism in twitter. The term can also be used to refer to the act of showing support for a cause through a like, share, etc. on any social media platform, such as Facebook or Twitter. It is arguably developed by Chris Messina, a former Google developer in 2007 to create a platform where in people can have organized communication. For example, #Metoo campaign encouraged the survivors of sexual assault to share their story.
Jay V says:
very complex word