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<div class="">In perusing a Christmas gift — Keith Houston, <i class="">Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks</i> (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013) — I encountered a wonderfully bogus etymology with cartographic
implications.</div>
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<div class="">The discussion of the # symbol emphasized the multiple names for it (hash, pound, number, etc.) and mentions a term I have never heard before: “octothorp.” According to Houston (p. 48), the etymology of this was apparently provided by Robert Bringhurst
in his <i class="">Elements of Typographic Style</i> (Vancouver, 2008) as<br class="">
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<div apple-content-edited="true" class="">In cartography, # is a traditional symbol for
<i class="">village</i>: eight fields around a central square. That is the source of its name.
<i class="">Octothorp</i> means eight fields.</div>
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<div apple-content-edited="true" class="">However, as Houston then explains (pp. 49–56), "octothorp(e)” seems to have been a playful creation by engineers at Bell Labs and has no relevance whatsoever to maps.</div>
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<div apple-content-edited="true" class="">Enjoy!</div>
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<div apple-content-edited="true" class="">Matthew</div>
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<div apple-content-edited="true" class="">---------------------<br class="">
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Matthew Edney<br class="">
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Director, History of Cartography Project<br class="">
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goto <a href="http://www.geography.wisc.edu/histcart" class="">http://www.geography.wisc.edu/histcart</a><br class="">
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<a href="http://www.supportuw.org/giveto/histcart" class="">http://www.supportuw.org/giveto/histcart</a><br class="">
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<a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/HOC" class="">http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/HOC</a> >> free access to vols. 1-3<br class="">
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also Osher Professor in the History of Cartography, University of Southern Maine<br class="">
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<a href="http://www.maphistorydirectory.org/index.php/User:Edney.Matthew" class="">http://www.maphistorydirectory.org/index.php/User:Edney.Matthew</a><br class="">
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