What do you call #?

I casually mentioned to one of my co-workers to today that he needed to use the ‘pound’ sign in some code he was writing. Of course, I didn’t think about the fact that the ‘pound’ sign to him is first and foremost the currency symbol, £.

Upon realizing the error, I corrected myself by calling it the tic-tac-toe sign. Still puzzled, I pointed it out on the keyboard, to which he replied, “Oh, you mean the hash sign.”

Come to find out that they don’t call it ‘pound’ at all over here, and I had never heard it called hash. In addition, they call the game of tic-tac-toe “naughts and crosses.” Of course when I first heard this I thought they were saying “knots and crosses” but then figured out they meant naughts like zeros.

Just goes to show that despite being here for 8 months now, there are still slight differences in language and culture catch me off guard.