If you require to keep up conversation threads touch on to this show on social culture medium — whether Twitter , Facebook , or Instagram , Tumblr — you have sex to front for the hashtag:#99pi . In our current digital age , the hashtag discover movements , effect , occurrence , brands — topics of all kinds . The “ # ” did n’t always have this meaning , though .
It ’s had a few different lives .
The hashtag , as we acknowledge it , was behave one day in 2007 . An early Twitter drug user named Chris Messina , in anticipation of an event call BarCamp , tweeted out :
https://twitter.com/embed/status/223115412
“ Barcamp ” does n’t really require a hashtag , because if you typecast “ barcamp ” ( with no space between “ barroom ” and “ camp ” ) into the hunt loge , it ’s a specific enough term that you will probably not get too many unrelated bang . But if , say , the outcome had been stylized “ Bar Camp , ” a search therefrom would also render results for bar and cantonment .
The idea was resonant . The “ # ” was a way to make clear , top-notch - specific search term .
you may look for hashtagsacross the entire internet .
The pound symbolisation had already pervaded other corners of the web . Internet Relay Chat ( IRC ) used the pound polarity to symbolize chat suite , or conversation “ transmission channel ” ; another societal web call Jaiku also had them .
For most people , pound symbol looked strange and newfangled . A subset of reliable believers stood by the sign , and one twitter user called it a “ hash ticket , ” hash being the British name for the sign . finally , “ hash rag ” became “ hashtag . ”
A few month later , in October 2007 , a developer named Nate Ritter was reporting on a wildfire in San Diego , and Ritter was using Twitter to carry updates as the story developed . He began related to tweet with , “ San Diego Fire . ” Easy for a human being to take , but firmly for a computer to sort .
Chris Messina reached out to Nate Ritter and proposed that he use “ # sandiegofire . ” Then other people looking to find out about the fervour would know exactly where to look on Twitter .
The original New World chat between Nate and Chris .
This is the moment when everyone realized the ability of the hashtag .
In the globe out of doors of Twitter , though , it is still “ the number sign . ” It has a sight of other uses , too . In Bromus secalinus , it represents a move that results in checkmate . In proofreading , it think of a space should be inserted . On Swedish function , it represent a lumber yard .
Excerpt fromthisSwedish map key . # Brädgård , courtesy of Keith Houston .
Whether call hashish , pound , number sign , lumberyard — the symbolic representation traces back to Ancient Rome .
Its story start up with the Latin full term Libra Pondo , mean “ pound in weighting . ” This was shorten to lb , which we still use . When lb became standard , it was often drawn with a little legal profession across the whirligig of both letters ( ℔ ) , just to show that the l and the b were connected . As scribes begin writing this augury quicker and quicker , lb began to morph .
From left : an inadvertent pound mansion , penned by Sir Isaac Newton , when he was try out to wrote “ ℔ , ” the symbolisation at the right . Image good manners of Keith Houston .
Over time , the symbolic representation ’s substance started to bifurcate — it was used for the unit punt , and it also start to be used as a identification number sign . It was of import enough to wind up on typewriter keyboards , which help it outlast .
The pilcrow in action . picture courtesy of Keith Houston .
tight forward to 1963 . the innovation of the cutaneous senses feeling telephony .
The touch tone headphone used buttons alternatively of a rotary wheel , and so unlike former earpiece , the number no longer had to be arranged in a circle on the dial .
Proposed telephone keypad layouts , as draw by R. L. Deininger in Human Factors Engineering Studies of the Design and Use of Pushbutton Telephone Sets . persona in public world .
Bell Laboratories , a enquiry subsidiary of AT&T , experiment with a few different purpose for the phone key domiciliation . They tried arranging the numbers in two row of five , in a circle , in a cross , in a step pattern , but ended up arranging the phone number 1 to 9 in a 3×3 grid , and put zero alone at the bottom center .
A computer keyboard in 1963 . photograph from theAT&T archives .
In 1968 , Bell Labs they decided to add together keys on either side of the zero . This would make the keypad into a nice even rectangle , and give substance abuser a few more choice on a phone menu .
Unlike orbitual speech sound , touch whole tone phones allow you to carry on to dial after the connection has been made , enabling the raw telephone systems , such as automated carte du jour . Additional buttons , they realized , could be handy in this regard . They settled on the star ( * ) and the turn , or Egyptian pound signboard ( # ) , mostly because they were symbols that they knew computers would be able to recognise and were already on the stock QWERTY keyboard .
A computer keyboard in the seventies . Photo byShizhao .
AT&T did n’t sleep together what to call the “ # ” clitoris in their manuals .
From a 1999 issuing of Encore , a publication written for and about AT&T retirees .
A yoke of Bell Labs employee make up one’s mind to call it an “ Octotherp”—a name reasonably much pulled out of thin air . ( “ Octo- ” refers to the SHAPE eight lines that stick out of the sides ; “ -therp ” is entirely made up . )
“ Octotherp ” morph into “ octothorpe”—which , hearsay has it , came fromsomeone at Bell Labs changing the nameto turn over it into a testimonial to an olympic athlete identify Jim Thorpe . But no one really knows .
Jim Thorpe . May or may not have something to do with the Octothorpe .
Whatever it ought to be called , Chris Messina select to use this symbolization for collating Twitter search in 2007 because he desire a sign that could be remark from a low - tech cell phone . He had two choice : octothorpe or asterisk . He prefer the former .
And that is how the British pound sterling sign ( or number house , or hash marking , or octothorpe ) came into ubiquity on billboard , promotional cloth , protest star sign , and in your annoying booster ’s conversation .
Silly old phone , why do you have a key for#hashtags ? You do n’t even do Twitter!pic.twitter.com / dMZJaNTfED
— @mikko ( @mikko)January 24 , 2014
Producer Avery Trufelman spoke withChris Messina , inventor of the hashtag;Andy Lorek , a former employee of Twitter ; Keith Houston , the author ofShady Characters : The Secret Life of Punctuation , Symbols , and Other Typographical Marks ; Doug Kerr , the engineer who choose the # symbol for the telephone keypad ; and Lauren Asplund , who coined the word “ octotherp ” for AT&T.
Read Doug Kerr ’s in - depth story of the octotherp storyhere .
This posthas been republished with permit fromRoman Mars . It was originally published on99 % Invisible ’s web log , which accompany each podcast .
99 % invisibleDesignX ( Twitter )
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