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This section identifies common names for several glyphs.
The "at" sign or "commercial at" sign. In the past, it has also meant "each" or "each at". Consider the following example supplied by Clive Burton:
Unit Extended
Qnty Unit Item Price Price
12 reams bond paper @ 5.50 66.00
Here' "@" means each at or simply each.
PostScript calls this the "at" sign.
This mark has several common names: 'hash', 'hatch', 'pound sign', and 'octothorp' among them. The name "pound sign" is an Americanism that causes some confusion in countries that use the pound for currency.
It was also noted that the # is a medieval abbreviation for Latin ``numerus'' - it is a cursive 'n' with a horizontal slash through it, much modified and abstracted.
One possible derivation of the name ``octothorp'' was provided by Charles Bigelow:
... old English "thorp" meant 'hamlet' or 'village' (I'm not sure of the
difference, except maybe hamlet is smaller, as its apparent diminutive
suffix would suggest), and is derived from a much older Indo-European
word *treb- for 'dwelling', which turns out to mean 'beam' or 'timber'
in Latin "trabs", winding up as "trave" in Anglo-Latin, like
"architrave" - the beam resting on a column, or "trab-" as in
"trabecula" - a small supporting beam or bar. As Voltaire said,
etymology is a science in which the vowels count for nothing and the
consonants for very little.
So, maybe "octothorp" means "8-beams", which makes a kind of sense if
we take the 8 projections to be the thorps, or trabs or traves. Though
it's only a "quadrathorp" if we think that the beams connect.
Another explanation has it that the octothorp is a ``thorp'' surrounded by eight cultivated fields.
Both of these etymologies received some skepticism amongst the readers who commented on comp.fonts.
PostScript calls this the "numbersign".