#is an octothorpe
*is a hexathorpe
+a quadrathorpe
-a duothorpebut What is a thorpe???
This question came from an argument in comments on stackoverflow that started over an American calling a
#a pound sign.
Answer
Thorpe
The -thorpe comes from octothorpe. Its origins are unknown. The other words are rare and likely variations after octothorpe.
Octothorpe
The OED says of octothorpe:
The term was reportedly coined in the early 1960s by Don Macpherson, an employee of Bell Laboratories:
1996 Telecom Heritage No. 28. 53 His thought process was as follows: There are eight points on the symbol so octo should be part of the name. We need a few more letters or another syllable to make a noun… (Don Macpherson..was active in a group that was trying to get Jim Thorpe’s Olympic medals returned from Sweden). The phrase thorpe would be unique.
For an alternative explanation see quot. 1996; in a variant of this explanation, the word is explained as arising from the use of the symbol in cartography to represent a village.
For a different explanation from a former employee of Bell Laboratories, arguing that the word is a completely arbitrary formation (and that it originally had the form octatherp) see D. A. Kerr ‘The ASCII Character Octatherp’ in http://doug.kerr.home.att.net (2006).
Quot. 1996 is:
1996 New Scientist 30 Mar. 54/3 The term ‘octothorp(e)’ (which MWCD10 dates 1971) was invented for ‘#’, allegedly by Bell Labs engineers when touch-tone telephones were introduced in the mid-1960s. ‘Octo-’ means eight, and ‘thorp’ was an Old English word for village: apparently the sign was playfully construed as eight fields surrounding a village.
Hexathorpe, quadrathorpe and duothorpe
Hexathorpe, quadrathorpe and duothorpe don’t appear in the OED and I suspect they’re variations after octothorpe. They also don’t figure in this Google Ngrams chart and a quick search of Usenet shows they’re usually mentioned in reference to the octothorpe.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Still.Tony , Answer Author : Hugo
