| Definitions | | octothorpe |
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noun
- (context, mainly, US) A name for the hash or square symbol (
- ), used mainly in telephony and computing
- 1982, Willard R. Espy, A Children's Almanac of Words at Play, Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., page 230
- : Octothorp is the
- on a push-button telephone. Rumor at the telephone company is that a man named Charles B. Octothorp, wanting to make his name famous...
- 2004, Andrew Pitonyak, Openoffice.Org Macros Explained, Hentzenwerke, page 139
- : Strings are enclosed in double quotation marks, numbers are not enclosed in anything, and dates and Boolean values are enclosed between (
- ) characters.
Etymology: Origin disputed. Reportedly a jocular coinage by Bell Labs supervisor Don Macpherson in the early 1960s, from (term, octo-, , eight) (with reference to the eight points) + (term, , -thorpe) (after 1912 Olympic medalist w:Jim Thorpe, Jim Thorpe, in whom Macpherson had some interest). However, Doug Kerrhttp://doug.kerr.home.att.net/pumpkin/index.htmOctatherp attributes (term, octatherp) to engineers John C. Schaak and Herbert T. Uthlaut, and Lauren Asplund to himself and Howard Eby. The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories (1991) supports (term, octotherp) as the original spelling, and telephone engineers as the source.
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