Topic summary
octothorp
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Number sign.
Octothorp
The word octothorp or octatherp was invented by workers at the Bell Telephone Laboratories by 1968, who wanted to add an eleventh and a twelfth key to the telephone keypad and needed named symbols to identify them. While there is typically agreement that octo- or octa- is here the common prefix meaning eight, various stories abound about the nature of the thorp. Don MacPherson is said to have created the word by combining octo and the last name of Jim Thorpe, an Olympic medalist. Lauren Asplund declared that he and Howard Eby invented the word in 1964: