Why do #, lb and pound all have the same sound?

Answer 1

In the United States, the # symbol was traditionally called the pound sign. This derives from a series of abbreviations for pound avoirdupois, which is a unit of mass (although pound is generally used as a unit of weight; for more information, see pound-force and pound (unit of mass)). At first "lb." was used; later, printers got a special font made up of an "lb" with a line through the ascenders so that the "l" would not be mistaken for a "1". Unicode character U+2114 (℔) is called the "LB Bar Symbol," and it is a cursive development of this symbol. Finally came the reduction to two horizontal and two vertical strokes.

Its traditional commercial use in the U.S. was such that when it followed a number, it was to be read as "pounds", as in 5# of sugar, and when it preceded a number, it was to be read as 'number', as in #2 pencil. Thus the same character in a printer's type case had two uses.

It has many other names (and uses) in English. (Those in bold are listed as alternative names in the Unicode documentation.)

* comment sign
* from its use in many shell scripts and some programming languages like Perl to introduce comments
* crosshatch
* resemblance
* crunch
*possibly used by computer programmers, as parallel to ! (exclamation mark), which programmers often call "bang". These two characters are used together in shell scripts. The parallelism stems from cosmological physics, which posits that the universe began in a "big bang" and may end in a "big crunch".
* fence, gate, grid, gridlet
*resemblance
* hash / hash mark / hash sign
* the most common name outside the U.S., including in the Ireland, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
* Used in Ireland, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand on touch-tone telephones – "Please press the hash key"
* In the UK and Australia the symbol is often used as medical shorthand for 'fracture'


The pound (abbreviations: lb or, sometimes in the United States, #) is the name of a unit of mass in a number of different systems, including various systems of units of mass that formed part of English units, Imperial units, and United States customary units. Its size can vary from system to system. The most commonly used pound today is the international avoirdupois pound.

The distinction between mass and weight (or force), and its development, is discussed in the article on weight. In some circumstances, the pound is used as the name of a unit of force. That usage is discussed in the article on pound-force (a unit of force based on a mass of one (avoirdupois) pound and the force of gravity at the surface of the Earth).

The word “pound” comes from the Latin word pendere, meaning “to weigh”. The Latin word libra means “scales, balances" and it also describes a Roman unit of mass similar to a pound. This is the origin of the abbreviation “lb” or “℔” for the pound. The “s” at the end of “lbs” simply denotes the plural form.

In the United Kingdom there is a historical link between the pound as a unit of mass and the pound as a unit of currency (the pound sterling), because the unit of currency was defined in the past in terms of a specific quantity of silver.

The avoirdupois pound was invented by London merchants in 1303.

Answer 2

lb stands for libra the Latin word for a scale but it also means the unit of weigh we call the pound. The symbol lb is used in both the US and the UK to mean the pound. The hash mark ( #) is strictly an American symbol for the pound, not used in Britain. Both lb and # are abbreviated ways to write or type the symbols for the pound in the same way we write 5' 10" to mean 5 feet 10 inches or $ 10 to mean 10 dollars.

Answer 3

They are all representative of the same thing : a pound is a unit of measure.

The abbreviation "lb" is derived from the Roman Libra from which we take the same measure of weight and call a "pound". The "#" is called the "pound sign". it is represented on the telephone and also a short hand method of wrighting "lb".

Pound=lb=#

Answer 4

Because they are spelled the same way! Just like the word "bear"...it is an animal, but also has the meaning of to carry a burden..as in "bear a burden." or..."race" means to compete to be the fastest..or refers to ethnicity. There are many words like that...in other languages they have the same thing. The symbol # and the letters lb. are abbreviations for the word "pound"...a measure of wt. But the word pound can also mean to beat or strike an object.

Answer 5

its all the same word, but # is a logogram with a symbol representing a word, lb is and an abbreviation of the Latin 'Libra' for weighing scales but we use the english word, and pound is pound

Answer 6

lb. and # are short for pound. I think the "lb." may come from the latin or some such.

Apparently, # has a different name in different societies. It is pound in the US.

Answer 7

lb is short for libra, a latin word which was an ancient roman measure of weight, equalling 12 ounces.

# is just an abbreviation for pound in america, to be different than the british.

Answer 8

they don't all the others are wrong with hash
that is an octothorpe, the programmers named it after the english term for village as it looks like a village with 8 fields surrounding

Answer 9

# is spoken as pound so that answers 1/3
lb. is the abbeviation for pound no more answers needed

Answer 10

Because they all mean the same thing, so you say them the same way.