Thorpe /θɔːp/ noun
The back half of octothorpe - a name for #, the character that starts every Markdown heading.
Coined at Bell Labs in the 1960s, when # and * joined the new touch-tone keypad. The octo- counts the symbol's eight points. The -thorpe nobody agrees on, but could be a reference to...
- Jim Thorpe. Engineer Don Macpherson was campaigning to get the athlete's Olympic medals back from Sweden.
- A joke. Colleagues coined it as octatherp, picking an awkward th to trip up non-English speakers.
- Eight fields round a village. Thorp is Old Norse for a hamlet, as in Scunthorpe. Tidy - and almost certainly invented afterwards.