France attempts to ban the word ’hashtag,’ replace it with ’mot-dièse’

The French language police are carrying out their mission of cracking down on English words encroaching on the French language by officially banning the Twitter term "hashtag."

The Commission Générale de Terminologie et de Néologisme has decreed that hashtag shall henceforth be known as "mot-dièse," which is from Gallic and translates to English as "sharp-word," reports Time.

News of the word swap was posted on the government website Journal Officiel Wednesday, reports The Local. Mot-dièse will, from now on, be used in all official French documents.

Critics were quick to tweet about the decree, saying that hashtag was preferable.

Some also pointed out that dièse appears to be an error, since it refers to the musical sharp, whereas the hashtag symbol used on Twitter (#) is used to refer to a number.

There is also a problem with the hyphen in the middle of mot-dièse, which prevents the entire word itself from being used as a Twitter hashtag.