I refer to ^ as simply “shift 6” when telling someone what to type. It seems to cause less trouble than actually naming it.
Burns: Same here, we used to call quotation marks for “birds”.
i’ve always gotten by by drawing the characters into the air. I don’t know what i’d do if i’d have to explain say ~ (tilde) to someone on the phone. Even more so if the person wasn’t really computer savvy.
But now that i think about it i remember doing that on the phone more than once. It musn’t have been all that traumatizing an experience after all, otherwise i would of remembered it.
Surely these things have different names based on the context.
! is ‘bang’ in #! /bin/perl and ‘not’ in if(!a) well in my house they are 
Also you missed … is that an elipsys?
= ‘et’, so et cetera (etc.) becomes c.
Under normal circumstances, I call # the pound sign, but Perl standard calls it hash, and the UNIX tagging at the beginning of most perl programs (#! /usr/bin/perl ) is called the hash-bang.
I find it strange that you put ‘full stop’ in the rare section. Periods are (almost) always called full stops in Enlgand, as a certain youtube video featuring Al Murray’s standup will show: (couldn’t find the video, so I’ll try to remember what he said)
[speaking to an American audience member]
“…We’re divided by a common language, see to you, ‘period’ probably means ‘full stop’ doesn’t it? Which is essentially the same thing to an English man a certain time of the month…”
You mean nobody calls a * a dereference?
In greek some people call the @ sign “duckling” (the greek equivalent word)! Could never figure out why they do that.
When you said pound you meant not # (hash symbol in my books)
I guess that comes of being English though.
In spanish we often call the # “ta-te-ti” which is spanish for Tic-tac-toe.
I agree with Gilbert. I use different words for ASCII chars depending on context, and the example of the bang/not/factorial is a good one especially since that switch in context can also be in the same code, i.e. Perl in this case. The converse is also true that a particular pronunciation can be a homophone for multiple ASCII chars. So, if I say to a colleague, “Type if x equals y,” this implies a certain form based on context. In one language, the parens may be optional. In another, they may be required but the other party should know that and as such they don’t require pronunciation.
Where this gets really screwed up is with slash v. backslash. Can’t count the number of times I have had someone telling me how to do something at work and messed it up because they said backslash when they should have said slash.
My new word of the day is gozointa.
Jamie Phelps: I’m sick and tired of the damn commercials that’re run by multibillion dollar corporations on TV and radio that still get FORWARD SLASH (/) confused with BACK SLASH ()
If they want, they can throw me a few thousand bucks and have me look over their radio/TV scripts.
Most of those rare names sound like some sort of exotic drug nicknames.
I usually just end up calling things ‘squiggly line’ and ‘uppy squarey bracket thing’ while waving my arms about and trying to form the shapes with my fingers. I’d take the time to learn the proper names but nobody would understand anyway.
I understand the word parenthesis, but in the UK, () are nearly always just ‘brackets’ with the other two being square and curly brackets.
nicely done and much better laid out than the other site. because of that i’m linking to you rather than the source, cuz ‘dang! who needs all the visual chaos?’
thanks for the heads-upBANG
@dnm I totally agree! Like they couldn’t have some intern from IT clarify for them that the thing was wrong…
In order to avoid being too US or English-centric, let me tell you how I spell some of these characters in french (the other one are probably sharing some latin origin and sounds like their counterparts) :
" : guillemets
: dise
[] : crochets
{} : accolades
, : virgule
@ : arobase
_ : espace soulign
As our fellow Fenris said above, @ is spanish is ‘arroba’ which was a mass unit, like a barrel, equivalent to 11.502 kg.
^ is “techito” ( Rooftop )
I’ve also heard someone call the vertical bar | “hurn” Which means Ferret. ( the animal ) Wonder why…