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At 10:51 AM -0500 9/26/96, Elaine R. Firestone wrote:
>It's an "octothorp" -- no "e" at the end.
When I first came across it in maybe 1983 or so in one of the UNIX/C books,
I wondered if "octothorp" was some kind of joke by Brian Kernighan or
Dennis Ritchie or Steve Bourne (I forget which), because I could find it in
no reference book. It is not in Webster's 9th New Collegiate (W9NCD) nor in
the second college edition of that cosmetic derivative of it, the American
Heritage Dictionary. However, it is in W10NCD, with a citation date of
1971. There is no etymology found for -thorp.
I call # "pound sign" (def. 2 in W10NCD), though that is problematic for
British Commonwealth readers, or "number sign" (not in my dictionaries).
According to W10NCD, a hash mark is a service stripe on a military uniform
or an inbounds line on an American football field.
