Octothorpe

Here’s a Latin-inspired symbol whose significance has been pretty severely changed by technology. # is ultimately scribbled shorthand for “libra pondo,” a Latin phrase used as a unit of measure in the Roman Empire. The ligatures in the Latin script eventually became literally solidified into a single symbol when cast in lead for printing purposes, allegedly by Isaac Newton.

The symbol then lived on the periphery of typewriting keyboards and later became the way we would begrudgingly talk to computers via telephone. After being called upon to serve as a topical bucketing tool on Twitter, # is the way we very eagerly communicate with millions of computers.

A vestigial linguistic organ no more, #’s place in communication is once again relevant, in a very different but also similar way than it was when it denoted exchange values in the Roman Empire— and with strikingly familiar connotations.