Am 15.07.2015 um 14:48 schrieb scott:
>> Or the "Pound" symbol as it is called in America. (Shift+3 on American
>> keyboards.)
>
> Now that's confusing. What about hashtags, do they have poundtags?

My suspicion is that this terminology is a relic of early information 
technology, when 7-bit character encoding was still the norm. In the US 
this of course meant ASCII, but in other countries slight variations 
thereof were standardized, replacing less-commonly used characters with 
local special characters.

One such character code mapped to a non-ASCII character by some national 
standards was decimal 35 (0x23). While the ASCII character set maps this 
code to the hash character ("#"), the corresponding UK 7-bit character 
encoding standard (BS 4730) repurposed this code for - ta-da! - the 
pound sterling character ("£").

American computer users were certainly blissfully unaware of this fact, 
and also possibly blissfully unaware of the proper term for their "#" 
sign; so when in newsgroups or on other computer-based discussion 
platforms they would see Brits use a character that on their terminals 
showed up as "#", and see the Brits call it the "pound character", they 
might have been quick to adopt that name for the hash.

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