Hashtags may not be words, grammatically speaking, but they help spread a message
The Conversation
Hashtags are a pervasive feature of social media posts and used widely in search engines.
Anything with the intent of attracting a wide audience usually comes with a memorable hashtag — #MeToo, #FreeHongKong, #LoveWins, #BlackLivesMatter, #COVID19 and #SupremeCourt are just some examples.
First conceived in 2007 by blogger and open source advocate Chris Messina on Twitter, hashtags are now also escaping from social media contexts and appearing regularly in advertising and protest signs, and even in spoken language.
But are hashtags words?
If there is one thing linguists ought to know, it’s words. But when it comes to hashtags, the definition is not straightforward.
In our research, based on a collection of millions of New Zealand English tweets, we argue hashtags are, at best, artificial words.
