A French advisory agency in charge of establishing language standards for official use, this week renamed Twitter’s popular hashtag character (#) “mot-dièse,” The Associated Press reported Friday. The Academie Francaise, which helps write standards for government agencies to encourage them to use French language terms in legal and official documents, published the new term on Wednesday, the report stated. But the agency hasn’t had a strong record of success, failing to get people to use “courriel” instead of email and to avoid the word “weekend.”
Twitter’s popular hashtag character, previously known primarily as the pound or number sign “#”, is published by users within their Tweets to denote trending terms on the website and groups of similar tweets.
H/T: Gizmodo.
Correction: This report originally stated that Academie Francaise was a government agency in charge of enforcing official laws, when it is merely an advisory group. We regret the error and have since corrected it in copy.
