Special characters have been given pronunciations similar to letters and numbers in a radio alphabet. The most common pronunciations originated with users of Unix

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

 systems.
Each of the ASCII printable characters has multiple names — some formal, some concise, some silly (Intercal

INTERCAL

INTERCAL, a programming language parody, is an esoteric programming language that was created by Don Woods and James M. Lyon, two Princeton University students, in 1972. It satirizes aspects of the various programming languages at the time, as well as the proliferation of proposed language...

 is responsible for some of this).

ASCII special characters

The following is a fairly complete list:

ASCII CODE
21 ! - "bang"
22 " - "quote"
23 # - "hash" - distinct from "pound" which is the British currency symbol, "sharp"
24 $ - "bling", "ding" (cash register sound), "cash", "buck"
25 % - "Bond" ("double-oh-seven")
26 & - "amper" - distinct from "amp" in "&" (see below) and the word "and"
27 ' - "tick"
28 ( - "paren", "open"
29 ) - "paren", "close"
2A * = "splat", "star"
2B + - "plus"
2C , - "twitch"
2D - - "dash","minus"
2E . - "dot", "period"
2F / = "slash"
3A : - "two dots"
3B ; - "semi", "semicolon"
3C < - "waka", "less"
3D = - "equals"
3E > - "waka", "more"
3F ? - "hook", "query", "eh?"
40 @ - "whirl", "monkey"
5B [ - "square", "left"
5C \ - "whack"
5D ] - "square", "right"
5E ^ - "hat", "caret"
5F _ - "skid", "underbar"
 
60 ` - "grave"
7B { - "curly", "embrace"
7C | - "bar", "pipe"
7D } - "curly", "unbrace"
7E ~ - "twiddle", "tilde"
B4 ´ - "acute"

#! - "sh'bang" (hash/bang)

Shebang (Unix)

In computing, a shebang is the character sequence consisting of the characters number sign and exclamation point , when it occurs as the first two characters on the first line of a text file...

/* - "slashterix"
*/ - "asterslash"
&amp; - "amper-amp" - the HTML and XML encoding for the ampersand character