Funny Pic Thread VII - No swearing. No sex. No complaining. (READ FIRST POST)

Beeblebrox237 · May 9, 2018

Jimlaad43
£ is a pound
# called a pound is idiocy

I only very recently learned that that's what people meant by the pound sign. I spent a decade pressing the asterisk on phones instead. What a stupid, counterintuitive name for what I was taught was the "number symbol" and later the "hash".

TVR27 · May 9, 2018

Jimlaad43
£ is a pound
# called a pound is idiocy

In North American English, it's sometimes called the pound sign and used as a symbol for pounds weight: this can be confusing for British people for whom a pound sign is £. It's also known as the number sign in North American English, in contexts such as go to question #2.

TexRex · May 9, 2018

*cough*

ProjectWHaT · May 9, 2018

It's actually called the octothorpe

TexRex · May 9, 2018

Touring Mars · May 9, 2018

Silver Arrows · May 9, 2018

A good one that you GTP'ers will probably recognize...

MedigoFlame · May 10, 2018

Dennisch · May 10, 2018

Liquid · May 10, 2018

# has always been the hash key or the number key, no? I thought it being called the pound key was a US thing.

TexRex · May 10, 2018

Liquid
# has always been the hash key or the number key, no? I thought it being called the pound key was a US thing.

As I indicated earlier, it bears striking resemblance to the ancient roman symbol for libra pondo, or "pound by weight."

How we got from that to the octothorpe, I don't know...maybe someone somewhere sometime forgot to dip their pen and uneven flow led to the missing loop.

Then again, it may be an uncanny coincidence.