Unsupported titles/Number sign

See also: ♯

# U+0023, # NUMBER SIGN ← " [U+0022] Basic Latin $ → [U+0024]

﹟ U+FE5F, ﹟ SMALL NUMBER SIGN ← ﹞ [U+FE5E] Small Form Variants ﹠ → [U+FE60]

＃ U+FF03, ＃ FULLWIDTH NUMBER SIGN ← ＂ [U+FF02] Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms ＄ → [U+FF04]

Contents

Translingual

Symbol

# (English symbol name number sign or hash or pound sign or octothorpe)

1. (cartography) Used to denote a village.
2. (chess notation) Checkmate.
3. (computing) The hash character.
4. (medicine) A fracture.
5. (Internet) A hashtag, which is a metadata tag for use in microblogging and social network services, used to label and search content.
6. (Usenet) Used to pad the left side of a quotation from a manual or official source.
7. (mathematics, computer science) Concatenation.
8. (set theory) The cardinality of a set.

   #{ 5, 3, 7, 11 } = 4

9. (phonology) Used to indicate a word boundary.
10. (syntax) Used to indicate that a sentence is grammatical but semantically strange.
11. Alternative form of ‡

Usage notes

In English it is called the hash, number sign, pound sign (American), or octothorpe (uncommon).

Synonyms

• (chess notation): ++
• (set theory): card, | |

Coordinate terms

• (to pad a quotation on Usenet): > (for a quotation not necessarily from a manual or official source)

Derived terms

• # #
• eq #
• hr #
• #MeToo

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English

Etymology

The symbol # derives from the abbreviation lb for Latin libra (“pound”), via the medieval convention of indicating abbreviations with a bar, ℔.

Noun

# (plural # or #s)

1. (food packaging, US) Pound (unit of weight).

   3# — "three pounds"

2. (followed by a numeral: used attributively) Number.

   #3 — "number three"

3. (Internet slang, text messaging) Number.
   • 1997 June 17, RYankowski [username], “Why collect new U.S.?”, in rec.collecting.stamps, Usenet‎^[1]:

     I have collected U.S. Stamps since I was a boy back in the 1950's. At that time there was a low # being printed and it was affordable.

4. (linguistics) Denotes a word or morpheme boundary.

Synonyms

• (number): no.

Related terms

• £

See also

• Number sign on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

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Chinese

Alternative forms

• (superscript) ^#

Glyph origin

Likely from English.

Pronunciation

• Mandarin

  (Pinyin): hào

  (Zhuyin): ㄏㄠˋ

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• Mandarin
  • (Standard Chinese)⁺
    • Pinyin: hào
    • Zhuyin: ㄏㄠˋ
    • Gwoyeu Romatzyh: haw
    • Tongyong Pinyin: hào
    • IPA ^(key): /xɑʊ̯⁵¹/
      
  • (Standard Chinese, erhua-ed)⁺
    • Pinyin: hàor
    • Zhuyin: ㄏㄠˋㄦ
    • Gwoyeu Romatzyh: haull
    • Tongyong Pinyin: hàor
    • IPA ^(key): /xaʊ̯ɻʷ⁵¹/

Noun

#

1. (Mainland China) Alternative form of 號／号 (hào, “number”), used after a numeral.