Hash

How to spell hash

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hash

What does hash mean?

1. nounA cooked dish of chopped meat and potatoes fried together.
2. nounThe # symbol, used on phones and in writing to mark numbers or tags.
3. nounA fixed-size value produced by scrambling data, used to verify or index it.
4. verbTo chop something into small pieces, or to discuss a matter thoroughly.

Hash in a sentence

• noun

  The diner served corned beef hash with two fried eggs.

• noun

  To confirm the payment, press the hash key on your phone.

• noun

  The system stores a hash of each password rather than the password itself.

• verb

  The team met after lunch to hash out the final budget.

• noun

  She fried the leftover potatoes into a quick hash for breakfast.

• noun

  The form asked her to enter the code followed by a hash sign.

Where does hash come from?

Language of origin: French

This word comes from the French hacher, meaning 'to chop' or 'to cut into small pieces', which was built on hache, the French word for a hatchet or axe. English borrowed it in the middle of the 1600s, first as a verb for chopping food and then as a noun for the chopped dish itself, especially a fry-up of diced meat and potatoes. From the literal idea of cutting things up came the figurative sense of 'a muddle' or 'a mess', as in making a hash of something, since chopped-up matter looks jumbled. In the twentieth century the cross-hatched # symbol picked up the name 'hash' in British usage, probably echoing the chopped, criss-crossed lines, and computing later borrowed the term for a 'hash function' that scrambles data into a fixed-size value. The same chopping root also gives us 'hatchet', which keeps the original axe sense visible.

How the word is built

• hash (from French hacher: to chop), used as a noun and verb in English