The alt.usage.english FAQ   

• names of "&", "@", and "#"

  (Words Frequently Sought)
  
  

  
     (The lists of names given in this entry are DELIBERATELY
  incomplete.  For a comprehensive list of formal and informal terms
  for these and many other keyboard symbols, see the entry ASCII in
  the Jargon File.)
  
     "&" is called "ampersand".
  
     The longest name for "@" is "commercial at sign"; the first and
  last words may each be omitted.  The official ANSI/CCITT name is
  "commercial at".
  
     There are actually two typeset symbols, with distinct histories,
  for which we use "#" in ASCII text.
     One (with horizontal strokes slanted and thicker than the
  vertical strokes) is the musical "sharp (sign)", as in "the key of
  C# major".
     The other (with vertical strokes slanted) is called "number
  (sign)", as in "the team finished in the #5 position", or "pound
  (sign)", referring to weight, as in "a 5# bag of potatoes".
  Although use of this sign to denote weight has declined, "pound" is
  the most widely used name for it in the U.S.  But it confuses people
  who expect that term to mean the symbol for sterling currency
  (located on many British keyboards in the same place as "#" is found
  on U.S. keyboards).  "Number sign", adopted by ANSI/CCITT, is
  unambiguous, but little known in both the U.K. and the U.S.
     Computer-users in the U.K. usually call the symbol a "hash", from
  its appearance (reminiscent of marks one might make when chopping).
     Finally, in a failed attempt to avoid the naming problem by
  creating a new name, the term "octothorp(e)" (which MWCD10 dates
  1971) was invented for "#", allegedly by Bell Labs engineers when
  touch-tone telephones were introduced in the mid-1960s.  "Octo-"
  means eight, and "thorp" was an Old English word for _village_:
  apparently the sign was playfully construed as eight fields
  surrounding a village.  Another story has it that a Bell Labs
  supervisor named Don MacPherson coined the word from the number of
  endpoints and from the surname of U.S. athlete James Francis Thorpe.
  Merriam-Webster Editorial Department told me:  "All of the stories
  you record are known to us, but the evidence does not line up nicely
  behind any one of them."

  
  
  Source: [Mark Israel, 'Words Frequently Sought: names of "&", "@", and "#"', The alt.usage.english FAQ file,(line 5867), (29 Sept 1997)]
  
  
  
  

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