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HASHTAGS

On page 317, we shared the stories behind some of the most ubiquitous words and phrases of the 2010s. As we were finishing up, we realized we almost forgot one of the most ubiquitous: “hashtag.” The story of this little symbol turned out to be so big that we had to give it its own article. #origins #technology #popculture #bathroomreading #arewedoingthisright

HASHTAGS 101

When Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and Gen Yers look at this thing—# —the phrase that springs to mind is probably “number sign” or “pound sign.” But for most Millennials and anyone born after 2000, the only thing this symbol has ever been is a hashtag. And it seems that the younger you are, the more natural the concept of hashtagging is. So for you older non-tech types out there, here’s how it works: the practice of “hashtagging” is typing a number sign, followed by a word or phrase, on social media websites like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram. Once you type it, the word or phrase (the hashtag) becomes blue, turning it into a hyperlink. Now, the post or tweet that it’s attached to is instantly accessible to anyone else who views that same hashtag. Structurally, a hashtag can consist of only letters, numbers, or underscores (no other symbols or spaces).

Let’s say you post a photo of a toilet and then caption it, “Look at my awesome toilet!” No matter what social media site you’re on, if that’s all there is to your post, then only your “friends” (people you’re connected to) can see it. But if you add the hashtag #toilet after the post, then any of the other millions of people on that site who are interested in toilets can find your toilet pic. The more relevant hashtags you add (#awesome #porcelain #sitting_pretty), the more chances for people to see it. Also referred to as “keywording,” this is just one of the hashtag’s many functions. You can use them to add commentary or self-deprecating humor to your posts (such as #isanyonereallyreadingthis), for advertising campaigns, and to follow developing news stories.

But how did the number sign come to be called a hashtag?

SYMBOLIC ORIGINS

The number sign (#) and the British pound sign (£) have had an intertwining history. For example, the number sign is also called a pound sign, but that refers to the weight measurement, not British currency. Both symbols, however, come from the Latin libra pondo (“pound weight”), which was shortened to this: . The horizontal line was added to clarify that it’s the letter l and not the number 1. And over time, as written shorthand developed, the symbol eventually transformed into this: #. It’s unclear exactly when that happened, but by the time typewriters became available in the 19th century, they all included the #. Since then, the symbol has served many purposes: it is most commonly used to indicate numbers and weights; in musical notation, it indicates a sharp; in copyediting, it means to add a space; and if you’re notating a chess match, a # means “checkmate.”

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In the 1960s, the symbol changed yet again when technicians at Bell Labs placed it below the number 9 on the first telephones with touch-tone keypads. They called the thing an “octatherp” or “octothorpe” (the stories vary), claiming it was a combination of the ancient Greek octo and the Old Norse thorpe, meaning “eight villages.” That’s what we reported in 2001 in our Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader, but later research revealed that the Bell techs may have named the word after famed Native American athlete Jim Thorpe. Or maybe it came from James Oglethorpe, the British general who founded the state of Georgia.

Whatever the true origin, it doesn’t matter because “octothorpe” never caught on as a name for the symbol—which has also been called a crunch, diamond, grid, mesh, thud, thump, splat, tic-tac-toe, pig-pen, crosshatch, and hash mark. And if you phone businesses in some Asian countries, you may hear, “Please enter your phone number followed by the hex key.”

COMMON KNOWLEDGE

The # symbol moved from analog to digital in the 1980s when it started showing up in early text-messaging IRC (Internet Relay Chat) networks to label groups. So in August 2007, it wasn’t a huge leap for a San Francisco typographer named Chris Messina to type, “How do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?” Messina was on Twitter, which was barely a year old. And #barcamp is now considered the world’s first hashtag. Here’s the tweet:

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Messina, who also had a hand in developing Google and Uber, was proposing using a hyperlinked word to connect online users who were discussing the same topic. “At the time,” he later recalled, “we were thinking Twitter needs some kind of group organizing framework.” Messina said he chose the number sign mainly because it was easy to access on his Nokia phone. (In those days, phones didn’t have QWERTY keyboards, so texting was a more painstaking process on the numbers keypad.)

Two days later, a fellow techie named Stowe Boyd elaborated on Messina’s idea in a blog post he called “Hash Tags = Twitter Groupings,” writing, “I support the hash tag convention.” And that marked the first use of the term “hashtag.” Boyd was drawing from yet another name for the # symbol, a hash mark. The “hash” part is British (short for “cross-hatch”), which most likely came from the stripes on 1910s military jackets, but it’s unclear exactly when the word became associated with the symbol. Regardless, Boyd’s term “hashtag” had a lot going for it from the start: it’s short, fun to say, and nothing had ever been called that before.

TRENDING TOPIC

Messina brought the hashtag concept to Twitter executives, explaining that it might help “organize tweets so you know what to pay attention to and what to ignore.” But other Twitter users were slow to embrace it, as were the higher-ups at the company. “They didn’t like it,” Messina told the New Statesman in 2014. “They said it was ‘for nerds’ and would likely never catch on.”

The hashtag got a huge boost in October 2007 when a wildfire broke out near San Diego, California. Messina noticed that several people were tweeting about the fire, and suggested to one of them that he follow each tweet with #sandiegofire. Soon others were using the same hashtag, and Messina realized that a lot of people around the world wanted to be able to participate in conversations like these, and using hashtags was a simple way to achieve that goal.

Still, for the next couple of years, hashtags were mostly viewed as something that only tech geeks used. But Messina kept pushing the idea, and in 2009 Twitter started automatically linking anything that began with a hashtag. “The more companies they acquired that supported hashtags,” he said, “the more inevitable it became that Twitter would need to officially support them.” A year later, the company added hashtag-generated “trending topics” to its home page, and the word went mainstream. In January 2011, Audi released the first hashtag campaign in a Super Bowl commercial. Two Super Bowls later, half of the commercials featured hashtags.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

In 2012 the American Dialect Society voted “hashtag” Word of the Year, explaining that it had become “a ubiquitous phenomenon in online talk… creating instant social trends, spreading bite-sized viral messages on topics ranging from politics to pop culture.” Merriam-Webster added the word to its dictionary in 2014. By that time, all the other major social media outlets had installed a hashtag feature. Result: if you want to build a huge following on photo-sharing sites like Instagram and Pinterest, you have to master the use of hashtags. In fact, some users prefer to follow hashtags and not people. Hashtag use became so rampant, in fact, that social media sites now enforce a strict no-more-than-30-hashtags-per-post limit.

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Now that the internet has been taken over by #s, their impact is being felt all over the real world. Some examples:

#breaking_news: Place a hashtag in front of an unfolding event like #puertorico or #bostonmarathon and your post becomes the leading news source. This feature has made Twitter a competitor to 24-hour cable news networks—routinely beating them to breaking news stories and allowing unfiltered, on-the-ground information to get out to the public. As a result, more and more journalists have turned to Twitter as a source.

#activism: Put a hashtag in front of an idea, and it can help launch an entire social movement. Examples: #Bahrain (the hashtag that launched the #ArabSpring), #TaxedEnoughAlready (the hashtag that launched the Tea Party), as well as #OccupyWallStreet, #BlackLivesMatter, and #MeToo. In 2014 hashtags helped the #IceBucketChallenge (a summer trend that saw people pour ice water on themselves) raise more than $115 million for ALS research, which actually led to the discovery of a previously unknown gene that causes the neurodegenerative disease.

#advertising: Creative uses of hashtagging have become crucial tools for businesses both big and small to increase fans and awareness. One of the earliest successes was the NBA’s decision in 2012 to allow fans to vote for their All-Star Game picks using the hashtag #NBAVOTE along with the player’s name and/ or Twitter handle. Marketers love these types of campaigns because they get the customers to do the advertising for them. For example, in 2015 Disney (in conjunction with the Make-A-Wish Foundation) kicked off its five-year-long #ShareYourEars campaign, inviting Twitter’s 330 million users to post a selfie wearing Mickey Mouse ears and then tag it #ShareYourEars. The tweeters got to feel like they were part of something bigger, Make-A-Wish made tens of millions of dollars, and Disney increased their brand awareness (as if they needed it).

#education: If it’s been a few years since you were in school, you’d be amazed at the ways hashtags are being incorporated into assignments and curriculums. For example, teachers who want to join a “Personal Learning Network” will read this on the “Getting Smart” home page: “When used properly, education hashtags can help you take part in important conversations and make valuable connections whether you’re a teacher, principal, or superintendent. Some hashtags are genuinely helpful when you are trying to search for important things like #GOPDebate or #NationalCatDay, while some of them are #completelymadeupandridiculous.”

#completelymadeupandridiculous: Uncle John’s favorite use of the symbol, not surprisingly, is the wordplay game “Hashtag Wars,” popularized by the Comedy Central game show @Midnight (2013–17), in which comedians had to come up with witty puns based on hashtag challenges. The game outlasted the show, and is still played online today. (We can’t mention this game and then not give an example. The hashtag challenge #AddStarWarsImproveAMovie inspired such entries as A Death Star is Born, The Hills Have Jedis, R2-D2 Mighty Ducks, The Sith Sense, and Cool Hand Luke Skywalker.)

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When the hashtag turned 10 years old in 2017, Wired magazine summed up its impact: “Sure, it can indicate where you’re posting from (#OvalOffice) or what you’re posting about (#FakeNews), but the hashtag has also shaped elections, launched social movements, and transcended its meaning as a mere keystroke to become a defining symbol of the digital age.”

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People with huge followings on social media tend to use a lot of hashtags. You may think that seems annoying, or that the poster is “fishing” for attention by casting a wide net with hashtags…and you’re right. Using that many hashtags will attract many more eyeballs. But how many is too many and how few is too few? According to the social media marketing experts at TrackMaven, the perfect number is nine. Posts with exactly nine hashtags receive more “engagement” (meaning views, reposts, likes, and comments) than posts with more or fewer.

#BACKLASH

These days, it seems, nothing can get this popular and not have its share of “haters” (another term from the 2010s), especially after the term “hashtag” made the jump from cyberspace to real life. Take the 2013 Grammy Awards—host LL Cool J was either trying to sound hip, or he was making fun of the word, when he said to the crowd, “I’ve been backstage reading all your tweets about hashtag Grammys. We’re going to see hashtag Carrie Underwood, hashtag Jack White, hashtag Kelly Clarkson, hashtag Bruno Mars, and hashtag Sting.” And among Millennials and members of Generation Z, it’s not uncommon for an awkward silence to be broken with the statement, “Hashtag awkward!” Another one you might hear is “hashtag winning.”

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But for some reason, hearing the word uttered in the real world really riles some folks. Case in point: A 2017 comment thread on the website Mumsnet that was titled “To not understand what someone means when they say ‘hashtag’?” There was post after post (59 in all) of bewildered moms trying to explain to each other what “hashtag” means. Many of the posts read like this one: “It’s nonsense. It makes no sense, which is why you do not understand it! # is a reference to Twitter, but people seem to think it is cool to say it in [real life] when it should be left on Twitter.”

A 2011 Gizmodo article called “How the Hashtag Is Ruining the English Language” was even harsher: “Hashtags at their best stand in as what linguists call ‘paralanguage,’ like shoulder shrugs and intonations. That’s fine. But at their most annoying, the colloquial hashtag has burst out of its use as a sorting tool and become a linguistic tumor—a tic more irritating than any banal link or lazy image meme.”

HASHTAGS FOR ALL

Like all elements of a living language, hashtags have proven their versatility and ability to adapt to whatever users want them to be—not unlike the # symbol from which they came. So don’t expect hashtagging to fade out like other 2010s fads (remember Gangnam Style?). “Nowadays,” wrote the entrepreneur website Seed Spot, “Hashtags are more than a #throwbackthursday or #mancrushmonday. They are the lifeline of social media, connecting followers with causes and increasing donation power. Hashtags give a voice to those without a pedestal, unify complete strangers, and can generate unstoppable momentum.”

And it’s important to note that “Open Source” advocate Chris Messina never copyrighted his idea because he believes hashtagging should be a tool that any user on any social media site can use… for free. “The hashtag was not created for Twitter,” he is quick to remind people. “The hashtag was created for the internet.” And he’s especially proud of where it came from: “Of all the possible symbols I could have chosen, I think the octothorpe was the best one. As a typography lover, I do like the look of the symbol. It’s one of the more dense characters, so you can see it from a distance or at a glance—it’s hard to miss!” #he_aint_kidding

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