Does the symbol @ have a name? If not, any suggestions? | Notes and Queries | guardian.co.uk

SEMANTIC ENIGMAS

Does the symbol @ have a name? If not, any suggestions?

IN ISRAEL the @ symbol is often referred to as “strudel”. Computer books often refer to @ as the “at sign”. Anyone who ever made or cut a strudel would agree th@ “strudel” is @ least as appropri@e a name as “at sign”.

Roy Sage ([email protected]). ,

IN DUTCH it is called apestaart , which means “monkey’s tail”. Because it looks like a monkey with his tail curled over him.

Martin Southwold ([email protected]). ,

SURELY it’s an “ampersat”?

Nyk Tarr, Rochdale, Lancs.

IN ENGLISH, the symbol is boringly known as “commercial at”, but other languages offer more imaginative names. In Swedish, it is called snabel-a , (“a” with an elephant’s trunk), or kanelbulle , the Swedish equivalent of the Chelsea bun. In German it is called Klammerraffe , (a clinging monkey) – presumably hanging from a tree by one arm.

Dr Gunnel Clark, Wotton-under-Edge, Glos.

IN GREEK, it’s called a little duck and in Russian a dog. Since animals seem to predominate, could I suggest the British term should be a mad cow rampant?

(Professor) Richard Macrory, Tackley, Oxford.

IT IS called an “atmark”. Its use in internet addresses has led to the production of a computer intended for accessing the World Wide Web called the Atmark computer.

Kit Barritt ([email protected]) ,

THE OFFICIAL name is the “at” sign, from the same school of typographer’s gobbledegook which gave us “octothorpe” (the #). This naming predates the use of @ by electronic mail systems the world over, and sadly produces many ambiguities when mail addresses are dictated over the phone. If pilots and the police can have special terminologies for clear communication, then I would like to propose an easy, relevant and linguistically distinguishable subtitute for the confusing ‘at’ naming. The name for @ should be “nerd”. This makes my email address, read over the phone, into “cassidys nerd cix dot compulink dot co dot uck”.

Steve Cassidy (normally in London EC2 but presently bored in Stuttgart) ,

IN BRAZIL the symbol is known as arroba , which is also an old measure of 15 kilos.

Michael Wrigley, Campinas, Brazil.

IN ITALIAN the symbol is known as a chiocciola (snail).

Geoffrey Allen, Pavia, Italy.

IN FINLAND it’s known as a mouse’s tail.

Stephen Ryan, Dublin ([email protected])

I heard someone on Radio 4 refer to it as an “e-snail” which I thought was nice.

Chris Winchester, London

In Hungary, the @ symbol is called “kukatsz”, which means little worm.

Chris Dalton, Budapest, Hungary

The Norwegian call the @ “kroellalfa”,meaning curled a.

S William Ingebrigtsen, Bergen, Norway

In Italian we call it “chiocciolina”, which means “small snail”. “Chiocciola”, as Geoffrey from Pavia suggests above, is much less used.

Luca De Piano, Milan, Italy

I’ve always understood that @ originally meant “account” and was regularly used in banking. I seem to remember that it appeared on cheques at one time. It seems a more likely explanation than “at”. After all, why would anyone want to abbreviate a two letter word?

Keith Mills, Alne, York UK

@ abbreviates more than just two letters. I remember it on signs in shop windows when I was a child in the early 60s e.g. Cabbages @ 3d, and on similarly on bills. It saves you writing ‘at’ and ‘each’.

Anne Lane, Greenwich

In Czech, it is called “zavinac” which means a rolled pickled herring.

Mojmir Pribina, Velka, Moravia

I have heard it called “petit escargot” (“little snail”) in France.

Katherine Ellis, London

I’ve always known it to be called the “short at”.

Henry Wolny, London

The French have a word for it: arobasse. I can’t find it in the dictionary but it does seem to have gained widespread acceptance. Quite an achievement in a country where hardly anyone knows (or cares about) the word for “ampersand”.

Rudiger Scheister, Paris

In Spain, we call it “arroba”, which also is a measurement of weight, but I can’t see the conection. ( 1 arroba = 15 kilos )

Maria, Toledo, Spain

We Catalans call the symbol “arrova” from “rova” meaning 1/4 (25%), originally a weight measure, as in Spanish. Looking at most email addresses (my own, for instance, it´s certainly 1 out of 4 items!) Relationship with weight? Not sure… but I personally find it heavy going to find the right key to type it.

Joan Diez, Amposta, Catalonia

How about calling it “letter a with a curly tail”? Do I win a fiver?

Charlie Peterson, York

At

David Burnfield, Sydney, Australia

Most people from Portuguese and Spanish-speaking countries answered that the name given to @ is “arroba” (and similars, like “arova”), the same name of a old weight measure unit. However, many people seem to ignore the history of this incidental coincidence: when the first typewriters started to be exported abroad US and UK, the key to @ had to be given a name. Since the @ was no known or used for anything on those countries, and since the current weight measure unit, the “arroba” (approximately 14 kilos) had by the time no symbol related to it, the Typewriter manufacturers and importers decided to call it arroba. Thus, for this simple and arbitrary decision, people from many countries started to call @ “arroba”.

Rodrigo Rey, Sao Paulo, Brazil

In Finland, apparently, it is called miukumauku because it looks like a sleeping cat.

Andrew, Norwich UK

In my country we call it the “cha-cha”. Historically this dates back to when dancers used to put character “a” on their back when dancing in competitions. To highlight the “a” it was put in a circle.

Jose Luis, London England

In POLAND the @ sign is called a “monkey”

peter gentle, warsaw poland

In Denmark we call it “snabel-a”, snabel meaning the trunk of an elephant

Stine Pedersen, Skanderborg Denmark

Small “a” in circle @
Please can any one let me know what this sign called ~ ?
my E-mail address is [email protected]
thank you.

Ab, Chicago U.S.A

In Jamaica it’s known as the block, the swirl depicting the feeling of nausia and dizziness having spent far too much time passing the rizla and herb. Derived from the term ‘block-up’ or in plain English, stoned.

Josiah Mackintosh, Port Antonio Jamaica

It’s the AT symbol and leave it @ that! 🙂

Kat, California, USA

In Russian, the @ symbol is often called “sabachka”, which means puppy.

Georgeta Solomitskaya-Lester, Cleveland, USA

A local game show here said that the official name of the at-sign is “amphora” taken from the name of a jar they used in the ancient medterranean to measure volume of things they would trade (where the @ symbol was supposedly first used).

Tina, Manila, Philippines

Printers on this side of the pond referred to it as a “commercial at,” just as the ampersand was a “commercial and.”

Howard Wolff, West Orange, NJ, USA

In Japan it’s called the atomaaku.

Mike O’Connell, Sapporo, Japan

If it wasn’t just the “at” symbol I’m sure somebody would have told us by now. My favourite from the foreign versions is the Czech one meaning a rolled pickled herring. Perhaps we could latch onto that one and call it a “rollmop”.

John Kemplen, Leighton Buzzard, England, UK

In American computer science, it is universally referred to as the “at sign”, or “at” when reading out a sequence of characters or an email address.
In Chinese, it’s called a mouse (shu), confusingly enough.

Ethan Bradford, US

I think it would be nice to call it a Titfer. @ = TITFER)
As any cockney Londoner will tell you, a Titfer is an “At” in Cockney Rhyming Slang.
Londoners usually drop their aitches and “At” stands for Hat i.e. Hat = Titfer Tat!

Leslie Nicholass, Colchester, England

The “~” (which somebody wanted to know the name of) is known as a tilde.

Rod Fielding, Bury, UK

Andrew from Norwich is right: in Finland @-sing is called (colloquially) miuku-mauku, or, alternatively, miumau, which actually referres to the sound that a cat makes (miaow) and @ thus symbolizes the figure of a cat curled up. Officially it is called ät-merkki (at sign).

Marjut, Helsinki, Finland

I call it a squiggle, because it is! A swirl, wiggle of a pen and scribble all in one word. Maybe someone was twirling their pen in circles whilst thinking what to write!

Paul Coleman, Oxford, UK

I agree with what said before: @ means “at £ each” and the fact that we have started using in email addresses does not mean that its name as “commercial at” should be discarded, but for ease and speed of conversation in everyday exchange of email addresses we perhaps should adopt the grammatically correct version of “ampersat” which, from the semantic point of view, means “instead of (at)”.

Roberta, London london

Growing up while in grammar school; 1960’s; my teacher told us it was an abbreviation for “at each” (for)…such as [email protected] or 5 for 1.00. Made sense then and still does today!

Jay, Atlanta USA

@ is an arobasse in French, and it is in the dictionary.

alan cowling, Nevez France

The french word is arobase.
Some are confusing the sign @ with ampersand which is not correct – ampersand is the & sign

Marilyn, Mauritius

Marilyn is right. I CONFUSED THE @ symbol with the ampersand symbol (&). I suppose the @ symbol is at especially in Email addresses.

Kelly, Orlando Florida usa

First description of symbol @ is dated century IV, detailing how many “arroba” (weight measurement about 25 pounds) of a freight by seaway from Seville to Rome.

Victor, Alsasua, Spain

There’s an awful lot of opinion on this subject floating about, but nobody seems to be citing any references. The best I can find anywhere online is at Wikipedia (but it’s Wikipedia so take it with a pinch of salt!). According to whoever wrote the article, it’s formal name is “commercial at”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%40

Rawlyn, UK

Of course the symbol @ has a name … it is alison taylor.

Alison Taylor, Moultrie, US

In Hungary we call it “kukac” that means in english “worm” 🙂

Peter Máté, Budapest Hungary

It is ASCII Code 64. Common names: at sign, strudel, rare, each, vortex, whorl, intercal, whirlpool, cyclone, snail, ape, cat, rose, cabbage, amphora. It also is used in email addresses. Ray Tomlinson was designing the first email program. It is derived from the latin preposition “ad” (at). It has been traced back to the Italian Renaissance in a Roman merchantile document signed by Francesco Lapi on 1536-05-04. In Dutch it is apestaartje (little tail), in German affenschwanz (ape tail). The French name is arobase. In Spain and Portugal it denotes a weight of about 25 pounds called arroba and the Italians call it chiocciola (snail). commercial at. (n.d.). This information is from The Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing. Retrieved April 25, 2008, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/commercial at

Tamera, Layton USA

I think the @ symbol means
“at the rate of” hence
3 pencils @ of 10 cents would be 30 cents.
Yes, @ means
“at the rate of”.

Jim York, West Monroe, La. USA

The @ symbol is correctly referred to as an asperand.
My nemonic is: ASP erand.

Stuart Lawrence, Oxford UK

& Ampersand
@ Aspersand

Charon, Manchester England

In Chinese, we call it a little mouse.

Kat Fan, Austin, Texas

Never mind what foreigners call it, to we Brits it’s simply ‘at’, although its use for any other purpose than to punctuate an e-mail address or to indicate per-unit pricing is the mark of laziness or of a foolish desire to seem ‘modern’.

Pete Wigens, Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK

An even more perverse use of the symbol is contained in a leaflet published by Stroud District Council, in which we are asked to ‘Sign up for free email @lerts’. Aaaaargh!

Pete Wigens, Stroud, UK

It means At.

Onti Chowdary, Bangladesh

Just spoke to someone on the phone in Bosnia. They called it ‘a crazy’.

Kimberly Rentfro, London

It’s an at mark, which is also used in T-SQL Programming to denote and define parameters and widecard programming. 🙂

Steve Stephan, Jacksonville, FL, United States of America

I wrote a book about the history of the @ sign (in Dutch). Let me make some improvements. (Source”: from the Dictionary.com).
It is derived from the Latin preposition “ad” (at). It is not, it has nothing to do with “ad”. It has been traced back to the Italian Renaissance in a Roman merchantile document signed by Francesco Lapi. But without any real connection, that is to say that there’s no prove that the at sign originate from the Italian use.

Hans van Keken, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

In Bulgarian it’s called “kliomba”, and also “monkey A”…the formal usage is “at”.

Alexander Mateev, Sofia, Bulgaria

In Soviet Russia, @ symbol names YOU!

Vladimir Oraschuck, Moscow, Russia

Ampersand is &. By defination @ is the “at symbol”.

Joe Kennedy, Glover, VT, USA

In a far province somewhere in the Philippines, it is a symbol of sexual desire from their ancestors. they believe that when they see the “@” sign, they need to have sex at once in front of people. It’s a sign of great respect for them. One time when a “katutubo” (which means native) came in Manila, (a city in the Philippines, he saw a very big billboard with the “@” sign, and what the native did is he grabbed a lady crossing the street and took his clothes off and ruthlessly had sex with the lady. The native was shocked that the people didn’t appreciate what he had done and instead, knocked him down and locked him behind bars.

Can Tooten Taio, Northwestern Scrida, Vietnam

In Nahuatl it is referred to as the: “O” otztli. In other words, the capital letter “O” pregnant. It is possibly due to the visually apparent little “o” inside the big “O”.

Waxaklahun, San Jose, California, US

Well in Greece we refer to it by the name..papaki(pa-pa-kee) which means little duck although snail,vortex,worm are better matches for the symbol in my opinion… and oh yeah.. it means *AT* and st *AREA* =D

Chris Vrizas, Athens, Greece

I hate how people are using @ before people’s names when addressing them on the internet, because you talk ‘to’ someone, not ‘at’ them!

Mark, VIRGINIA BEACH USA

In Romania it’s called “aron” but it doesn’t mean something particulary ^_^

Lena Davis, Vaslui, Romania

In Greek it’s called ‘papaki’ which means little duck. Someone on my blog suggested recently “alfaki”. I like this word very much, I think it’s cute 🙂 It means little alpha.

Dora, Cyprus

It is auction sign which used for rate and email addressing
it is separator between user and provider name in email address

raj, Gwalior, India

Although I think the Dutch apestaart (monkey’s tail) is the best answer, it actually comes from Old English bookkeeping and is short hand for ‘AT THE COST OF’ the letter a surrounded by the letter c.

Christopher, Liverpool, England

We use that symbol for our address on the net, don’t we? If someone asks you where you will be available or where you live, would you say, ‘I live AT xyz’; or ‘I live A WITH ELEPHANT’S TRUNK (or whatever is suggested above) xyz’?

Gaurang, Ahmedabd India

the symbol @ literally means ‘at the rate’

vyoma, mumbai india

My grandmother told me that this symbol is actually called and meant “around” before it was used by the meaning of “at each” which describes the shape of the symbol, it’s “a”, then “round” it.

Ricky Logan, Sydney Australia

I like capital 2!

Robin, Austin USA

In Korea, it is called ‘golbangi’ for the resemblance to a snail.
Excerpt from Wikipedia:

The (@) amphere sign is known by various names in English, including…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign

Personally, I think the ‘ampersand’ has a much better typographical history and makes more sense.

Timothy Berg, Seoul South Korea

In Wales w call it the Llanciffgochgochplatricuaticinibaabaa for short. It means a little lambs tail

mick, dublin

An @ is what you shouldn’t be without on Ilkley Moor or you’ll get all eaten by worms.

Steve, Bristle Currently in Denmark

In US it’s usage is archaic, means or meant “at” used in sales notation to speed up a notation that refer to pricing example 3 @ 2 for $1.
Three items priced at 2 for 1 dollar.

Avery, Blythe US

In my country the name for @ is similar to The Norwegian name “kroellalfa”,meaning curled a. In romanian we say “a rond” which can be translated “round a”.

Iulian, Constanta Romania

I calls it “Anarchy”

Pulaywit Madingus, Philadelphia USA

it’s the “at” symbol

Ben, Mandurah Australia

Since I was a small child I have called it “antricat” because it ended in “at” as ampersand ended in “and”. I was always going to send it to Websters but never did.

Mary Thornton, Vancouver, Washington USA

In France, it’s called AROBASE http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arobase

stephanie durand, alphinton Australia

What can I say? Israel’s “strudel ” usage is too wonderful. Most people see a lowercase ‘a’ with most of a circle around it…my people see a slice of European pastry!

Jane, Columbia SC

In Polish it is “małpa” = monkey. Most things you say in Polish are funny, and that is no exception, when you say: “My email is Paul monkey gmail dot com”.

Maks, Warsaw Poland

In Romania : arond (@)

Silvia,

@ Is a contraction symbol of the words: At Cost.

Harold Sperber, Hypoluxo United States

In Armenia we call it “Snik” it comes from Russian “Sabachka”.
Thank you all for your information.

Lily, Yerevan, Armenia

In Russia it also calls “sobaka” (“dog”) as a “sobachka” (not “puppy” but “little dog”). But all the times I’ve heard all say “dog”.

Artyom Scherbakov, Moscow oblast, Istra district, Dedovsk Russia

Some years ago I coined the word “epinota” as a name for the @ sign, from the Greek epi (at) and the Latin nota (sign). Yes, I know that’s mixing two root languages, but then we drive around in automobiles and not ipsomobiles.

Immanuel Burton, London, UK

I like “epinota”. I think this should become a universal name for @ sign.
In Armenian it is called “Sh-neek” which means a little dog; just a translation of Russian “Sobachka”.

Leann, LA USA

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