Can hash mark be used to mean one of those five lines used when counting something (prisoners use this method in movies to count their days in jail)? It's four vertical lines, with a horizontal line across, and then you start anew.

I'm not sure what to call this, and online dictionaries aren't very helpful.

@userr2684291 I've heard someone call it something before, but I forgot that something

I'm Googling 5-base numeral systems but no luck

@userr2684291 I don't think there's a widely accepted word, although this site calls them "tally marks" : tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TallyMarksOnThePrisonWall Sounds to me like they were reaching for an appropriate word as well

I think of them as scratches or marks

"Count marks" pulls up the right images in an image search: duckduckgo.com/… and "Tally marks" shows up again

That's usually my strategy - do an image search and then see what words people apply to those images

Thanks. I was on the bus and didn't wanna use up my data to do an image search (I get by on 200 MB a month).

@M.A.R.ಠ_ಠ That's not really a base-5 system, though, is it (I assume you meant base-6, though)?

It's a base-1 system, with a somewhat unorthodox but human-friendly notation system.

A base-6 system would have 54 mean 5 * 6^1 + 4 * 6^0 in base 10, which the tally mark system doesn't.

Hm... O0O0

Well isn't that just neat.

But, by the way, to completely butcher the deceased equine, I know I phrased it as if I'd been looking for a word for it (I was, in order to explain what I'm trying to compare the meaning of hash mark with), but I was in fact looking for the meaning of hash mark, which can be used as a synonym for tally mark, but it doesn't seem to be as common.

I confirmed the meaning was the one I suspected by looking it up on Google Books and examining the surrounding text.

@TasneemZH For your question about punctuation in a parenthetical I believe CGEL might be of help. Score yourself a copy of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston et al.) – it has a nice chapter on punctuation which covers that part fairly well.