An addition to Geoffrey Sampson's comments:
in North-Germany the symbol for their pound (500 grams) is written as what
I always perceived as two 't' - connected and the line at the second 't'
turned around and formed the horizontal line of both 't's -- an 'lb' with a
horizontal line would look very similar ('tb'). I learned at school the
(wrong?) reason for two t's, but forgot all about it.
Henning Reetz
Geoffrey Sampson wrote:
>I am pretty sure the reason for calling the # sign "pound" is that its
>graphic "etymology" was the letters lb with a horizontal line ligaturing
>them together, lb being the standard abbreviation for "pound", from
>Latin "librum" ("libra"? I can't remember the gender). In my lifetime
>in Britain, until recently when the ayatollahs of Brussels set about
>banning our weights and measures, we didn't use a special symbol to
>abbreviate "pound weight" but just typed/printed the ordinary "lb" letters;
>but in old documents I have seen "lb" with a cross line printed as a
>special "sort", as printers would call it, and I believe that is the
>symbol from which "#" developed in the USA. I think too (but now things
>are getting a bit mistier) that Americans at one stage wrote "#5" to
>mean "five pounds weight", rather than, as they now do, "number 5".
-->snip <--
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