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Englishforums Posted 14 years ago

Do you know all the computer keyboard key names in English?

Earlier computer keyboards were based either on teletype machines or keypunches. By the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, all computers used electronic keyboards. The layout of the computer keyboard still owes its origin to the inventor of the first typewriter, Christopher Latham Sholes. He also invented the QWERTY layout, and laid out the keys in such a way that common two-letter combinations were placed on opposite sides of the keyboard so that his mechanical keyboard would not jam.
. full stop (International) | period (American)
, comma
? question mark
! exclamation mark or bang
: colon
; semicolon
- hyphen, en dash
_ underscore
( and ) parentheses
[ and ] brackets
{ and } braces or curly brackets
' apostrophe or single quotation mark
" and " quotation marks
/ (forward) slash or 'virgule' (line break when quoting text), divide symbol
the pilcrow or paragraph symbol
§ the section symbol
& the ampersand
@ the 'at' symbol or ampersat
^ caret
# the number sign ('hash' symbol UK or 'pound' symbol US)
<> angle brackets, less than and greater than signs
¦ broken bar
| bar (or pipe for the unix geeks)
\ backslash
* asterisk (or splat for the geeks), multiply symbol
~ tilde
% percent sign
$ Dollar sign
Euro sign
£ Pound Sterling sign
  

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11 Answers
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My keyboard doesn't have a pilcrow or a section sign. It does have:

$ - Dollar sign
% - Percent sign
` - opening single-quote or (for the geeks) backtick
~ - tilde

The geeks will often call # a hash sign, too.

Also, there is a competing story for the QWERTY layout (possibly apocryphal), claiming that it was set up so that typewriter salesmen could spell TYPE
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Thanks! I didn't know this ^ was a caret!!!
My keyboards also have:
£ pound sterling sign
$ dollar sign
€ euro sign
% percent sign
° => I don't know what its name is in English ... it's the sign you put when writing temperatures: e.g., 25 °C or 90 °F (but we also use it for ordinal numbers).

PS: I thought # was the hash sign...
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Thanks guys, they've updated the article with some of your suggestions - we'll update ad infinitum, so comments are always welcome.
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curly brackets ...I didn't know that but I love its name Emotion: smile
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Thanks a lot ! It was really informative <3
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Thanks a lot for this informative stuff.

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