WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Grammar Minute: History of the Pound/Hash Sign

Episode Date: March 29, 2025

What's the history of this social media magic symbol? Learn more on today's episode of Grammar Minute!

Welcome to the Grammar Minute, where we're saving the English language 60 seconds out of time. I'm Lauren Smith, 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 bee, but over hundreds of years of frantic scribbling, it was reduced to two horizontal strokes crisscrossed by vertical slanted lines. Over time, the meaning also shifted to refer primarily to numbers rather than weight. It's not clear exactly why hashtags play such an important role in social media,

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. That's your Grammar Minute. Visit thegrammarminit.com for more tips and tricks.