The History of the Hashtag

12th century

In music, the # symbol appears. It raises the pitch of a note by one semitone. It's called #Sharp.

14th century

The abbreviation "lb" for libra enters English, and according to common scribal practice it is accessorised with a line drawn across the letters to highlight the use of a contraction. Slowly "lb" becomes # and stands for #Pounds.

1870

French engineer Emile Baudot invents the first telegraph alphabet. In version used by the British Post Office, 11011 is L but becomes # in the American version. Both are called #PoundSign.

Mid 20th century

Algebraic Notation replaces Descriptive Notation in Chess, # meaning #CheckMate.

1960

Bell Labs scientists add the symbol on the telephone keypad to send instructions to the telephone operating system. They call it #Octothorpe.

Late 1980s

The symbol starts to have various meaning in several programming languages, e.g. # is used in C-like languages to start a #PreprocessorDirective.

Mid 2000s

The symbol is used within IRC networks to #Label groups and topics.

August 23 2007

Chris Messina (factoryjoe) posts the first Tweet suggesting to use the symbol: "how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. AS in #barcamp (msg)?"

June 1 2009

Twitter hyperlinks all words preceded with #, making the feature official. The #Hashtag is born.

September 2012

Google introduces the #Hashtag feature on its social network.

June 2013

Facebook eventually introduces the #Hashtag.

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