#
Number sign
Prefixes hashtags, CSS id selectors (#header), issue numbers (#42), and numbered items (apartment #3); North American phone menus read it as 'pound'. Distinct from the musical sharp ♯, which straightens its vertical strokes and slants its horizontals. In URLs a bare # starts the fragment, so it must be encoded as %23 when it is data.
Biography
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
Copy it anywhere
- Symbol
# - Unicode
U+0023 - HTML entity
# - CSS content
\0023 - JavaScript
\u0023 - URL encoded
%23 - Windows Alt code
Alt+35