Reader's Digest １２月号の単語クイズ欄、Word Power、に次の問題がありました。
What is the increasingly popular keyboard character octothorpe better known as?
英数字以外の記号で８に関係のあるものが答えのはずですが、思いつかないので答えを見ると、
答え: #; hash; number sign
となっていました。語源は例によって諸説ありますが、覚え易さの観点から次の二つを引用しておきます。
・American HeritageR Dictionary: Coined in the 1960s by researchers at Bell Telephone Laboratories : OCTO- (probably in reference to the eight endpoints of the lines in the symbol) + -thorpe (perhaps from THORP, in reference to the resemblance of the symbol to a village surrounded by fields, or after James Francis Thorpe, because one of the researchers was an advocate of the restoration of Thorpe's Olympic medals).
・Wikipedia: Used by Bell Labs engineers by 1968. Lauren Asplund says that he and a colleague were the source of octothorp at AT&T engineering in New York in 1964. The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, 1991, has a long article that is consistent with Doug Kerr's essay, in that it says "octotherp" was the original spelling, and that the word arose in the 1960s among telephone engineers as a joke. The first appearance of "octothorp" in a US patent is in a 1973 filing which also refers to the six-pointed asterisk (?) used on telephone buttons as a "sextile".
# 記号は確かに８つの頂点がありますね。
What is the increasingly popular keyboard character octothorpe better known as?
英数字以外の記号で８に関係のあるものが答えのはずですが、思いつかないので答えを見ると、
答え: #; hash; number sign
となっていました。語源は例によって諸説ありますが、覚え易さの観点から次の二つを引用しておきます。
・American HeritageR Dictionary: Coined in the 1960s by researchers at Bell Telephone Laboratories : OCTO- (probably in reference to the eight endpoints of the lines in the symbol) + -thorpe (perhaps from THORP, in reference to the resemblance of the symbol to a village surrounded by fields, or after James Francis Thorpe, because one of the researchers was an advocate of the restoration of Thorpe's Olympic medals).
・Wikipedia: Used by Bell Labs engineers by 1968. Lauren Asplund says that he and a colleague were the source of octothorp at AT&T engineering in New York in 1964. The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, 1991, has a long article that is consistent with Doug Kerr's essay, in that it says "octotherp" was the original spelling, and that the word arose in the 1960s among telephone engineers as a joke. The first appearance of "octothorp" in a US patent is in a 1973 filing which also refers to the six-pointed asterisk (?) used on telephone buttons as a "sextile".
# 記号は確かに８つの頂点がありますね。
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