The ‘hashtag’: A new word or a new rule?

Born as a topic marker to make tweets searchable, today the pound symbol is gaining popularity not only on other social platforms, but also offline, with hashtags increasingly appearing in the linguistic landscape (e.g. headlines, advertising, political slogans). This paper analyzes hashtagging as a productive process of wordformation in English and Italian, both online and offline. The analysis is based on samples of hashtags from a corpus of tweets and samples appearing in the offline world. The study proposes a tentative taxonomy of hashtag types and poses questions on the nature of the ‘products’ of hashtagging. It also comments on the pragmatic exploitation of the collected samples.