Hashtag Trivia: 10 fun facts you surely didn’t know about the symbol!

hashtag n. : A word or phrase preceded by a hash and used to identify messages relating to a specific topic and also the hash symbol itself, when used in this way. The term hashtag is actually in dictionaries! Can you believe it? Stick around and check out some #awesome facts about your favorite symbol!

1. The first hashtag to be used on Twitter was Messina’s sample #barcamp.

2. Around 125 million hashtags are shared by Twitter’s 328 million users every day.

3. The most used hashtag on Twitter in 2016 was #Rio2016, closely followed by #Election2016 and #PokemonGo.

4. An infuriating craze that swept the world in 2015 became a game, internet meme and hashtag. #TheDress plagued Twitter users for weeks as they tried to decide if the dress was indeed white and gold or blue and black.

5. The Guinness World Record for the longest ever hashtag was awarded in 2013 to Paul Horner, author of Super Official News. The dizzying hashtag was 345 characters long, not including the #, and told a rude story about Horner’s life.

6. The term hashtag was added to the Merriam Webster dictionary in 2014. The definition said: “A word or phrase preceded by the symbol # that classifies or categorises the accompanying text (such as a tweet).”

7. One belief regarding the origins of the hashtag, is that when 14th-century Latin began to abbreviate the term for pound weight—libra pondo—to “lb,” a horizontal slash was added to denote the letters were connected. As people began to write more quickly, the letters and the tittle became amalgamated, eventually morphing into the symbol we see today.

8. It was originally called Octothorpe. AT&T employee Don MacPherson thought the sign needed a more official name, so he choseOctothorpe—“octo” because it has eight points, and “thorpe” because he was a fan of football hero Jim Thorpe.

9. Twitter wasn’t that into the idea of using hashtags at first.

10. By 2014, respect for the hashtag had grown to the point where the venerable Oxford English Dictionary gave the word its stamp of approval.

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