Weird Facts About 7 Punctuation Marks You See Everywhere

# Has a Name You’d 
Never Guess

Depending on when you were born, you probably know the # symbol as either a pound sign, number sign, 
or for the Twitter junkies among us, 
a hashtag. Turns out, none of those names are right: According to an 
engineer at Bell Labs (formerly part of AT&T), which made the symbol mainstream via its touch-tone telephones in 1968, that little hex is called an octothorpe. The octo logically describes the symbol’s eight points. As for the thorpe, some theories say it comes from the Old English word for village (thorp), referencing the hex’s appearance of eight little fields surrounding a central square; others say the Bell researchers were just really big fans of the late Olympian Jim Thorpe, and needed a cool-sounding syllable to finish their new word. #TheMoreYouKnow
(Here are 12 secret punctuation marks we should all start using.)