What is a hashtag, how is it used and what is the purpose?

The hashtag is used on an app called Instagram. Instagram is an app where you take pictures on your phone and share them with friends. You can also classify these images using a hashtag. For example, after taking a picture of Hawaii you would put #Hawaii in the description.

This makes it so that your image will come up when people search for images related to Hawaii.

This has transferred over to real life so now it is common for us teenagers to simply say #[something] instead of just [something]

Not sure if this made sense but hope it helps

It's used on many social media websites. The main are Instagram and Twitter. If you post a photo on Instagram, you would use a hashtag to describe the type of picture it is, that way people can look through photos that have been posted with that hashtag. For example, if you post a picture of... a sunset, you would use hashtags like #sunset #sun, etc. Same with Twitter.

It is used primarily on twitter and tumblr, but other social media sites use it as well. It is basically just something to help discover other posts, people etc. for example, you might send out a tweet "I love dogs #dogsrule"

Then with this, when you click on the #dogsrule, it will bring you to a page with all the tweets or posts that use #dogsrule, therefore allowing you to discover people and profiles that love dogs. It is used in many ways, but this is just a simple example. Good luck!