>>>>> "Peter" == Peter L Peres writes: > On Sat, 5 Sep 1998, Ansel Sermersheim wrote: >> # Octothorpe >> = Quadrathorpe >> - Bithorpe > Just out of curiosity, what connotations does the 'thorpe' root > have, that it got to have such immortalizing uses ? I'd never thought about it before, but after this message, I decided to look for more info. http://www.nynews.com/topics/bpa60503.htm explained quite a bit. Quoted from the site: "A fine word and yet obscure. The Alta Vista search engine claims an index of 11 billion words on 22 million Web pages. But a search for octothorp found it on only 24 of all those pages, and some of the cites were duplicated sites. In addition to your pound and Michael's hash, the Web provided other octothorp alternatives, including: number, grid, hatch, crosshatch, tictactoe, mesh, thud, thump and pigpen. I also encountered possible derivation for the word octothorp, attributed to one Charles Bigelow. The "octo" part is easy. As for the hard part, and without detailing the etymological detours, the old English thorp can be traced back to the old Latin "trabs," meaning beam. Take a look at the pigpen above the No. 3 on your keyboard. It has eight points, or eight projecting beams, or eight thorps." Given all that, it's the work of but a moment to generalise to the proper other terms, though I realise now that = and - should be bithorpe and unithorpe, respectively. -Ansel -- I used to be convinced that MicroSquish shipped crap because they simply didn't give a flying fuck as long as the sheep kept buying their shit. Now, I'm convinced that they really do ship the best products they are capable of writing, and *that's* tragic. - John C. Randolph, about MS quality control.