Welcome to the Grammar Minute, where we’re saving the English language sixty seconds at a time! I’m Lauren Smyth, and I’m back with another history of a weird punctuation mark. Where do we get the pound sign from—and what does it have to do with social media?
Most likely this sign actually did mean “pound,” as in a unit of weight used by the Romans. It was originally supposed to be a b, but over hundreds of years of frantic scribbling, it was reduced to a two horizontal strokes crisscrossed by vertical, slanted lines. Over time, the meaning also shifted to refer primarily to numbers rather than units of weight.
It’s not clear exactly why hashtags play such an important role in social media nowadays, other than the fact that they were traditionally used in computers to label text as having some different meaning than surrounding text. For example, a programmer might use hashtags to tell the computer not to run the following line of code, or to set a line apart as a personal note. In a post caption, hashtags are interpreted by the algorithm differently than the rest of the post.
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