A while back, on a whim, I asked my tweeps and Facebook friends “What do you call the # symbol?” For some reason, everybody is really excited about #, and all in all, I received 7 responses on Twitter and 24 on Facebook. Some of you are indecisive, so of those 32 responses (counting myself), there were 48 total answers.

I only recently got around to counting up the results, and of those 48, I grouped them into six essentially different responses:

• pound (or pound sign, or “pound that shit bro”),
• hash (or hatch),
• number (or number sign),
• sharp,
• octothorpe,
• and a few other responses (tic-tac-toe board, and 0×23).

Many respondents seemed to have a primary answer, followed by caveats (e.g., “Pound, except in music, where it’s a sharp.”) so I differentiated between the primary and subsequent responses for each person. The following graph shows the results, where dark blue indicates primary responses, and light blue indicates all subsequent responses.

If you want the raw responses for some reason, and you don’t want to cull it yourself from my Twitter and Facebook, I can send you a spreadsheet. Graph is courtesy of the Google Charts API, which is a pretty sweet way to make easily-modified charts. (Check out the image URL if you’re curious how it works. I wrote a trivial Perl script to make it easier to incrementally edit the parameters and view the results.)