1164. This week, we look at the origin of the octothorpe — also known as the pound sign or hashtag — and why it has so many different names. Then, we look at sentence fragments and the secret of "Sir Fragalot" to help you avoid common writing mistakes.
1164. This week, we look at the origin of the octothorpe — also known as the pound sign or hashtag — and why it has so many different names. Then, we look at sentence fragments and the secret of "Sir Fragalot" to help you avoid common writing mistakes.
A video of the man who invented snurfing.
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The octothorpe segment was written by Karen Lunde.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and today, we're going to talk about the origin of the octothorpe and about sentence fragments.
But before we start, I have something really fun to share. You might remember that a couple of weeks ago, I told you that snowboarding was originally called "snurfing," combining the words "snow" and "surfing." Well, a listener named Dan found a video interview with the man who invented snurfing! And it includes home videos of the first snurfing runs in his backyard. It's amazing. I'll put a link in the show notes, and you should be able to find it on all my social media channels too. I'm GrammarGirl on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Bluesky; TheGrammarGirl on Instagram and Threads; and @grammargirl.zirk.us at Mastodon.
This first segment is by Karen Lunde.
by Karen Lunde
You probably know what a hashtag is. It's that cross-hatch of two horizontal and two vertical lines you probably see all the time if you're on social media. The hashtag is everywhere! But you might not be aware of its surprising history, and its amusing, and kind of mysterious, name: the octothorpe.
But before we dig into the octothorpe story, let's talk a bit about the many other names for this little symbol.
If you're in North America, another common name for it is the "pound sign." You've probably heard things like "Enter your account number followed by the pound sign" when you call an automated phone system. But across the Atlantic in Britain, Ireland, and down in Australia, nobody calls it the pound sign. There, it's the "hash." And there's a theory that the word comes from "hatch," the artistic technique of cross-hatching to create shading. That makes sense when you look at the symbol because it really does look like a cross-hatched pattern.
In other parts of the world, you'll find even more variety. In the Netherlands, it's called the "hekje," which means a "little fence." In Singapore and Malaysia, it's often called "hex," which has nothing to do with casting spells. And if you're in France and dealing with proofreading, you might hear it called a "croisillon," which again refers to the cross-hatch appearance.
Of course, if you've been online in the last fifteen years, you've probably called it a hashtag. But technically, the word "hashtag" refers to the whole thing — the symbol plus the keyword that follows it. That term didn't really take off until 2007, when technologist Chris Messina tweeted the idea to use a hash to group related messages on Twitter. It was brilliant, simple, and it completely changed how we organize information online.
But before it was cool, before it was online, and before it was even called anything consistent, this symbol had a long and winding history.
The journey starts in ancient Rome with the unit of weight called "libra pondo" — literally "pound weight." As this concept migrated into English in the late 14th century, scribes started abbreviating it as "L-B." And then, following scribal convention of the time, they'd draw a horizontal line — called a tittle — across the abbreviation to give readers a heads-up that other letters had been omitted.
But medieval scribes weren't exactly the steadiest of hands. As handwriting got faster and more careless, those horizontal lines started blending with the letters themselves. The L and the B would blur and overlap with the abbreviation bar until—voilà!—you had something that looked less like letters and more like a cross-hatch pattern. You can actually see this happening in the manuscripts of Sir Isaac Newton. The Shady Characters blog has a wonderful image that shows how Newton's "LB" abbreviation looks a lot like today's pound sign.
And by the 19th century, the symbol had taken on a sort of double life in America. Put it before a number and it meant "number sign." Put it after a number and it indicated weight in pounds. But that created a linguistic headache when you started thinking about international communication. In Britain, the "pound sign" was already the name for the currency symbol, so the Americans and the British could end up talking past each other. That's partly why the British preference for "hash" never quite crossed the Atlantic.
And then came the octothorpe.
The word "octothorpe" is wonderfully grandiose and sounds almost ancient. But the 20th-century version was actually born out of necessity in the research labs of Bell Telephone Laboratories during the 1960s.
Bell was building a Touch-Tone telephone system; the kind that replaced the rotary phone dials those of us over a certain age remember. The grid worked fine for numbers one through nine — they could be laid out in rows of three. But that left the zero hanging out all alone on the bottom row. So, they added symbols for those two keys — the asterisk and the hash.
But the hash didn't have an official name, so someone needed to come up with one. And this is where the story gets a little murky.
One popular origin story involves a Bell Labs supervisor named Don Macpherson. According to this account, Macpherson selected "octo-" because the symbol has eight points. For the second half, he chose "thorpe" as a tribute to Jim Thorpe, the legendary Native American athlete whose Olympic gold medals had been stripped due to a technicality.
But in 2006, retired Bell Labs engineer Doug Kerr published a different recollection, suggesting that "octothorpe" (or rather, its original form "octatherp") started as a practical joke. Kerr had been complaining in internal reports about the lack of a professional name for the symbol. In response, according to Kerr's account, engineers Lauren Asplund and Howard Eby brainstormed the term "octatherp" during a lunch session in early 1964, combining "octo" (for the eight points) with "therp," a nonsense syllable that sounded vaguely Greek.
And that's not even the end of it. Because of course it isn't. Robert Bringhurst, in his book "The Elements of Typographic Style," suggests yet another origin. He writes: "In cartography, it is a traditional symbol for village: eight fields around a central square. That is the source of its name. Octothorp means eight fields." And for what it's worth, the Oxford English Dictionary does list "thorp" as an archaic Old English word that means small town or village, and especially an agricultural village, but we can't find any evidence the symbol was ever widely used in cartography to designate a village.
But whatever story you believe, by 1973 the octothorpe appeared in an official U.S. patent for the telephone data entry system. Merriam-Webster records the first known use a couple of years earlier in 1971.
So, what started as a Roman abbreviation for weight, then got mangled by medieval scribes' careless handwriting, and was eventually reinvented by 20th-century engineers, has now become one of the most recognizable symbols on the planet. Whether you call it a hash, a pound sign, a hashtag, or, if you're feeling fancy, an octothorpe, you're using a symbol with roots that go back centuries and a future that's probably still being written. Pretty cool for a little cross-hatched square.
That segment was written by Karen Lunde, a longtime writer and editor turned web designer and marketing mentor. Solo service business owners come to her for websites where beautiful design meets authentic words that actually build connections. Find her at chanterellemarketingstudio.com.
Next, I have a piece I love about sentence fragments from way back in 2011 that I've remastered because it follows so nicely from last week's piece about dependent clauses — and because it makes me laugh.
by Mignon Fogarty
I often imagine that listeners are writing long pieces such as articles, essays, and books; but I was recently reminded that some people make their living writing shorter things like headlines and ad copy, and that keeping things short is hard work. “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead,” is a famous quotation—often attributed to Mark Twain, but most likely from Blaise Pascal—that resonates with many people who write for a living.
Unfortunately, when writers focus too much on brevity, sometimes they leave out important words and produce fragments instead of sentences. Entering stage left, we have a new podcast character. [Fanfare.] Welcome, Sir Fragalot! Sir Fragalot flounces around the countryside shouting sentence fragments at unsuspecting strangers.
Sir Fragalot
Over the next hill! A tree with wings! On DVD December 19th!
Grammar Girl
Oh dear! Poor Sir Fragalot doesn’t know that you can’t magically make any set of words a sentence by starting with a capital letter and ending with a period (or an exclamation point). In the most basic form, a complete sentence must have a subject and a verb.
Sir Fragalot
Leaving town!
Grammar Girl
No, Sir Fragalot, you don’t have a subject or a verb. It would be “I am leaving town” or “He is leaving town.”
A verb is an action word that tells the reader what’s happening, and a subject does the action of the verb. You can make a complete sentence with just two words: “Squiggly hurried.” “Squiggly,” our beloved snail, is the subject, and “hurried” is the verb.
Sir Fragalot
Hurried onward!
Grammar Girl
No, Sir Fragalot, it would be “Squiggly hurried onward.” “Squiggly” is the subject; he’s the one hurrying.
There are even two types of sentences you can make with just one word. The first is an exclamation, like "Ouch!" "Wow!" and "Eureka!"
The second is called an imperative, which is a command, like "Run!" In an imperative the subject is always assumed to be the person you are talking to. If Squiggly looks at Aardvark and says, “Run!,” Aardvark knows he’s the one who should be running. It’s such a strong command that he knows it is imperative for him to run.
Sir Fragalot
Run!
Grammar Girl
Good job.
So you can make imperative sentences such as “Run!“ with one verb, and you can make simple complete sentences such as “Squiggly hurried,“ with a subject and a verb, but there is also a case where you have a subject and a verb, but you still don’t have a complete sentence. Ack! This happens when your fragment is a dependent clause, meaning that it depends on the other part of the sentence: the main clause.
If you’re dependent on your parents, you need them. It’s the same with dependent clauses; they need their main clauses.
Dependent clause fragments usually start with a subordinating conjunction such as "because," "although," or "if." I’m going to need more examples to explain this one. It makes a lot more sense when you hear examples.
Let’s go back to our simple sentence: “Squiggly hurried.” I’m sure you all get that this is a complete sentence because it has a subject and a verb. But look what happens if you put a subordinating conjunction in front of it: “Because Squiggly hurried.” By adding that “because,” I’ve completely messed up the sentence; now I need the part that explains the “because.” The “because” makes the whole thing a dependent clause that can’t exist on its own. (Well, it can exist, but it’s a fragment and that’s bad.) The dependent clause now only makes sense if it has a main clause; for example, “Aardvark was relieved because Squiggly hurried.”
Here’s another example. The word “that” can be a subordinating conjunction, so in some cases, if you put it at the beginning of a sentence, it can turn the sentence into a fragment.
Sir Fragalot
That Squiggly hurried.
Grammar Girl
Yeah, um, if you mean what I think you mean, that doesn’t make any sense, because it’s a fragment; but you can tack it onto the same main clause we used before, turning it into the dependent clause it was meant to be, and it makes sense again. “Aardvark was relieved that Squiggly hurried.”
To sum up, in the real world, you'll find fragments used in places like dialogue and for emphasis, but there are some easy tests if you want to see if you have a fragment. First, ignore exclamations like "Hey!" and "Yikes!" They're fine. The next easiest test is to ask yourself if there is a verb. If there’s no verb, then it’s a fragment. Then, if there is a verb and no subject, ask yourself if the sentence is a command. If it’s a command, then it’s an imperative sentence, and if it’s not a command, then it’s a fragment. [Exception alert*] Finally, ask yourself if it is a subordinate clause. If it is, then it is a fragment. That last one is a little trickier, but I’m sure you can do it!
Thanks to “Miss Peter” from Music Nerve for playing the part of Sir Fragalot.
Finally, I have a familect story from Maggie:
"Hey, this is Maggie from Vancouver, Washington and my famillect is 'dribzle,' D-R-I-B-Z-L-E. And this comes from when I was about four, and I liked to make up what I now know are portmanteau words, but I called them 'combined words' at the time.
And 'dribzle' was my combination of 'dribble' and 'drizzle'. And I feel like it is now used mostly by my dad when my dog has just taken a drink and is, um, leaving water on the floor.
And it’s kind of funny that he still uses a word that I made up years ago. But it is completely a famillect because I made it up. Just wanted to share."
Thanks, Maggie! I loved this one because usually it's parents instead of kids who call about the familect their family is still using. Also, I had a bullmastiff, and that dog definitely dribzled.
Before we finish, I want to wish all of you a happy National Grammar Day. It's coming up tomorrow, March 4, and I'll have the winner of the ACES National Grammar Day poetry contest on the show next week. I've also made my broadest LinkedIn Learning course free! Go to my profile on LinkedIn (It's under Mignon Fogarty), and look for the post with the link to the free course. It's called Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing. You can click on it any time, and after you do, you'll have 24 hours to view the course.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to all our Grammarpaloozian supporters on Patreon and beyond. And thanks to Maram Elnagheeb; Morgan Christianson; Holly Hutchings; Rebekah Sebastian, Nat Hoopes, and Dan Feierabend, who cried at the end of the novel "Starter Villain" by John Scalzi. (And man, I hear you, Dan. I loved that book too.)
I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
That's all. Thanks for listening!