Source: BBC

Talking about the “at” sign is much more interesting if you’re not speaking English.

The Wikipedia entry for @ lists names for it in over 50 other languages, many of which are colourful interpretations of its shape – and which, in true online style, often involve animal analogies.

Armenians call it ishnik, meaning a “puppy” (curled up on the floor, I assume). Chinese terms include xiao laoshu in Taiwan, meaning “little mouse” and quan ei on the mainland, meaning “circled A”. Danes, meanwhile, prefer snabela (an “elephant’s trunk A”).

One of my favourites: the Germans say klammeraffe, which means ‘cling monkey’

Hungarians have the less savorykukac (“worm” or “maggot”), Italians the slightly more palatablechiocciola (“snail”), while – two personal favourites – Kazakhs see a айқұлақ (“moon’s ear”) and some Germans a klammeraffe (“spider monkey”  – or, more precisely, “cling monkey”). If you’re Greek, you saypapaki, meaning “little duck.”

The use of the symbol dates back to the 1500s (Credit: iStock)

There’s interest outside the animal kingdom, too. Bosnians go for ludo A (“crazy letter A”), while in Slovak it is a zavinac(“pickled fish roll”) and in Turkish a guzel A (“beautiful A”). There’s even a special Morse Code signal for @ – the only new symbol added since World War One – formed by running together the dots and dashes for the letters “A” and “C” as a single character: (·–·-·).

Ray Tomlinson created a global emblem when he decided to use the symbol

I’ve written briefly about the history of the @ symbol in email in my bookNetymology, but for a definitive account there’s no better place than Keith Houston’s blog Shady Characters, which tells in wonderful detail the story of how in 1971 a 29-year-old computer engineer called Ray Tomlinson created a global emblem when he decided to make the obscure symbol “@” the fulcrum of his new email messaging system.

(Tomlinson died aged 74 on 5 March. Read more from BBC News about his life and impact.)

It was a good choice on Tomlinson’s part, being almost unused elsewhere in computer programming, as well as an intuitive fit for sending email to another person “at” a particular domain (email itself had existed before Tomlinson’s invention, but only as a means of communication between different users logged into the same computer system).

Previously, @ had existed in English largely as an accounting symbol, indicating the price of goods: buying 20 loaves of bread at 10 cents each might be written “20 loaves @ 10 ¢”.

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