Curiosities.
Some symbols are old enough to have a biography. The pilcrow that faded into an indentation, the interrobang someone actually invented, the £ that is just a Roman letter L — each glyph, its era, and its true story.
12 stories added recently — a fresh batch lands monthly.
Number sign
The leading theory traces it to lb, for the Latin libra pondo — pound by weight — written fast until the letters collapsed into crosshatch. Bell Labs engineers needed a name for the key on the 1960s touch-tone phone, and 'octothorpe' emerged: the octo is the eight points; the thorpe is disputed — the Jim Thorpe story is one claim among several.
also known asoctothorpehashpound sign
At signmerchant ledgers
Centuries of ledger duty before email: attested in merchant correspondence — a 1536 Florentine letter uses it for amphorae, a trade measure — and in Iberian records for the arroba unit. When Ray Tomlinson needed a separator for the first email addresses in 1971, he picked it precisely because it sat on the keyboard yet appeared in no names.
also known asarrobacommercial at
Daggerancient editing
From the obelus family — the ancient editors' mark for text they judged spurious, a line to flag a passage as doubtful or best cut. It later became the standard second footnote mark, following the asterisk, and it also carries the quiet meaning it still has today: placed before a name or year, it marks that a person has died.
also known asobelusobelisk
Pilcrowmedieval manuscripts
The pilcrow began as a capital C for the Latin capitulum — little head, or chapter — and gained its vertical strokes over time, once marking every new paragraph in a manuscript. When printers left blank space for rubricators to add the pilcrows by hand and deadlines won, the empty space itself became the paragraph break. The mark faded into the indentation we still use today.
also known asparagraph markcapitulum
AmpersandRoman cursive
Literally the Latin word et — and — fused into one character: a ligature so old it appears in Pompeiian graffiti. The name is a mangled school recitation. Children reciting the alphabet ended it with 'and per se and' — and, by itself, and — and generations of slurring compressed the phrase into 'ampersand'.
also known aset ligature
Hover the sketch — et fuses into &.
AsteriskLibrary of Alexandria
From the Greek asteriskos — little star. Aristarchus of Samothrace used it in the third-to-second century BC at the Library of Alexandria to flag duplicated lines in manuscripts of Homer, which makes it one of the oldest editorial marks still on duty. It has never stopped working: footnotes, corrections, redactions, wildcards.
Dollar sign1770s
The leading theory: a Spanish-American abbreviation ps, for pesos, written over and over in eighteenth-century correspondence until the p's stem crossed the s. The sign is documented in 1770s manuscripts before the United States adopted its peso-descended dollar — so the symbol is likely older than the currency it now names.
Generic currency sign1970s character sets
The placeholder that means some currency, unspecified. It was proposed in the 1970s for character sets so that countries would not have to fight over whose currency symbol got the code point — in some national ISO 646 variants it even shared a slot with the dollar sign. A genuinely funny artifact of internationalization: a symbol whose whole job is to stand in for a symbol. This network's Localechord wears it as its logo.
Horizontal ellipsisGreek rhetoric
The mark of trailing off. Writers had long used rows of dots to show a pause or an omission, and printers eventually standardized on three, evenly spaced, as one character. The word is Greek — élleipsis, a falling short or leaving out — the same root behind the ellipse and the grammarian's ellipsis, the words a sentence deliberately omits.
Interrobang1962
Invented in 1962 by New York advertising executive Martin K. Speckter, who wanted a single mark for the rhetorical question asked in disbelief — the kind that is half question, half exclamation. It got real traction: some 1960s typewriters offered the key as an option. Then it faded from everyday use, but Unicode keeps it alive with its own code point.
Pound signRoman weights
Simply an ornate capital L — for the Latin libra, the Roman balance scale and its unit of weight. It is the same libra that gives pounds their abbreviation lb, so the currency symbol and the weight abbreviation are two descendants of one Roman word. The crossbar is an old abbreviation mark, marking the L as standing in for something longer.
Tildemedieval scribes
Born as scribal shorthand: a small n floated above a word to mark an omitted letter, which is how Latin annus became Spanish año — and why the Spanish ñ still wears a tilde today. Medieval scribes saved parchment one letter at a time, and the squiggle that did the saving outlived the practice to become a character of its own.
A fresh story joins the shelf when we find one worth telling. Every symbol here is also just a click to copy — the biography is the bonus.