{"id":32,"date":"2006-04-10T16:52:55","date_gmt":"2006-04-10T15:52:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/2006\/04\/10\/octothorpes-and-interobangs\/"},"modified":"2006-04-10T16:52:55","modified_gmt":"2006-04-10T15:52:55","slug":"octothorpes-and-interobangs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=32","title":{"rendered":"Octothorpes and interrobangs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>octothorpe<\/strong>, noun = # The literal meaning of this word is &#8220;eight fields&#8221;: thorpe comes from the Old Norse for village, farm or hamlet, and octo means eight. In cartography it&#8217;s used as a symbol for villages: eight fields around a central square. Other names for this symbol include hash, numeral sign, number sign, pound sign and crosshatch.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s more information and the names of this symbol in various other languages on <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Octothorpe\">Wikipedia<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>interrobang<\/strong>, noun = \u203d &#8211; a little-used symbol that combines the question mark and exclamation mark.<\/p>\n<p>These words came up yesterday on <em>Word of Mouth<\/em>, BBC Radio 4&#8217;s programme about words and language, when they discussed some of the unusual names for symbols like #, @, &#038; and !. Other names they mentioned included screamer or bang for the exclamation mark (!), monkey&#8217;s tail, snail or elephant (in languages other than English) for the @ sign, bithorpe for the hyphen (-) and quadrothorpe for the equals sign (=).<\/p>\n<p>You can listen to <em>Word of Mouth<\/em> on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/radio4\/factual\/wordofmouth.shtml\">BBC website<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Do you have any interesting\/poetic names for these or other symbols?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>octothorpe, noun = # The literal meaning of this word is &#8220;eight fields&#8221;: thorpe comes from the Old Norse for village, farm or hamlet, and octo means eight. In cartography it&#8217;s used as a symbol for villages: eight fields around a central square. Other names for this symbol include hash, numeral sign, number sign, pound [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,10,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-language","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}