Hashtags in the Linguistic Landscape — The Origin

Today the usage of ‘#’ is mainly used to denote the metadata tags on social media. But, the official name of a hashtag is quite different — Octothorpe. The historical roots trace back to the symbol ℔ —an abbreviation of the Roman term libra pondo, meaning 'Pound weight'.
With time, the usage of the pound symbol gained popularity in Folksonomy. It is a system to classify and organize online content into different categories using tags. The hash or pound (#) symbol is not case-sensitive for example, #GRAVITY, #gravity, or #GRaviTY, #gRaViTy, are treated as the same unit. But the usage of hashtags remains indispensable other than just as a tool to make content easily searchable and findable across the social web. It is also frequently used in the field of computing and programming language that performs critical functions. For example, in HTML, CSS, and SVG, the symbol ‘#’ is used in identifying a color specified in hexadecimal format, e.g., #FFAA00.