For me, it was (and remains, in other contexts) the number sign, e.g., # 1, # 2, # 3.
Only with the advent of touch-tone phones (yes, I'm that old) did we get admonitions to "press the pound sign." I occasionally would see someone use "#" for the weight measurement, e.g. 50#, but not often. I always used "lbs" instead (itself a Latin abbreviation).
And when I'd see a list of symbols, "#" was always identified as "pound or hash sign," but nobody ever, ever called it the hash sign.
Until now.
Other symbols revived by the Internet (and computers in general): the ampersand "&" (used in some programming but also in web site addresses to append parameters) and the at "@" sign (previously rarely used for rates / cost of each item, now ubiquitous in email addresses).
I do find it amusing that computers and the Internet have revived some symbols that were marginal or rarely used.
Reshared post from +Jules Houser
I'm old enough that I used to call it an octothorpe.
+Al Hunt Nice!
Nobody knows what I mean when I say "octothorp" (or "octothorpe" – I didn't know that spelling).
🙁
Thinking about the eight points of an octothorp reminds me (tangentially) of how a friend and I laughed ourselves silly when we realized that Squiddly Diddly was a hexapus (hexopus?).
😀
It must be a US thing, because in India, we're still taught to call that the hash symbol..
I first knew it as a "number sign."
I originally learned it as a number sign, then as a pound sign. I know call it a pound sign unless it is in context of a hashtag.