Where Does the #Hashtag Symbol Come From?

Viewers like you help make PBS (Thank you 😃) . Support your local PBS Member Station here: Subscribe to Origin of Everything! What’s the #origin of the hashtag symbol? It’s gone by many names, (the pound sign, the number sign, the octothorpe and the hashtag symbol) and it’s had many meanings, but what is the origin of this # mysterious symbol? Well the truth is it goes back all the way to ancient Rome. But what’s even stranger is that the hashtag symbol can help us understand the always changing nature of the abstraction that is language itself. Do you enjoy the show? The check us out on: Like our Facebook Page: Instagram: @pbsoriginofeverything Written and Hosted By: Danielle Bainbridge Graphics By: Noelle Smith Directed By: Andrew Kornhaber Produced By: Kornhaber Brown () Works Cited Jacques Derrida Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference Ferdinand de Saussure Course in General Linguistics Roland Barthes Mythologies Gayatri Spivak “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Mikhail Bahktin The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays Sylvia Wynter “Ethno or Socio Poetics” Hortense Spillers “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words” “semiotics, n.“. OED Online. June 2017. Oxford University Press. 18 year old voting rate: