From: Philippe VERDY (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Mar 29 2005 - 10:09:25 CST
From: "George W Gerrity" <g.gerrity@gwg-associates.com.au>
> As are currency names in many other European languages, eg, Italian
> ?lira?, Spanish ?libra? (from Latin Libra, balance), which also means
> pound, or weight, Spanish ?peso?, weight, and Hebrew ???? (shekel),
> weight; ???? (lira) Israeli pound currency, etc.
Add the only recognized name for '#' in French: "dièse", after the name of the musical symbol. In French, this symbol is not used and recognized for anything else than musical notation, or for the symbol that is shown on phone keypads and that everybody calls "dièse" too.
(So NO connection with any currency or weight units, and is not apparently never used as an abbreviation too, and if you ask to people about such usage they will think it means "different from" as an alternate representation with two slashes over the equal sign).
Note that there's a significant number of French people that don't know how to name this character, so we here expresion like "croisillon", "sorte de croix", "étoile carrée", "signe égal avec deux barres", "double plus"... Maybe for this reason, vocal phone services avoid designating the '#' phone key for the navigation, and just use the asterisk (universally named "étoile") and digits.
Traditional French keyboards don't have this symbol (French PC keyboards map them to AltGr+3, mostly because it was made part since long of the reformed French ISO-636 7-bit charset to match the US-ASCII character used in programming).
I can't remember if another character was initially mapped on the 0x23 position of the obsolete ISO-636-French 7-bit charset standardized in the 1960's as I have always seen this character shown as '#' on all French products (it's possible that it was showing a pound sign on some imported products like printers).
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