@

[Dr. Goodword]

• @ •

Pronunciation: æt-sain • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Symbol

Meaning: 1. The at-sign, as English-speakers call it, is used to indicate the rate by which a set of items is valued, for instance, to buy two pounds of tomatoes @ (at) $5 a pound. 2. It is also used as an indicator of an e-mail address, e.g. 2bad@donttrythis.org, separating the account name from the domain name.

Notes: @ is a symbol widely used in English that does not have a special name as do the ampersand, semicolon, and period. We call it the at-sign" because it symbolizes the word at in price quotations. Elsewhere in Europe, however, this symbol has taken on a myriad of highly inventive names. Fasten your seatbelts!

In Play: Most Europeans see animals in the at-sign. The Dutch call it an apestaart "monkey's tail" while the Germans call it a Klammeraffe "spider monkey". In Serbian the word is majmun "monkey" but their fellow Slavs, the Russians, see a dog in it, hence their word, sobachka "little dog". Finns call it kissanhäntä "a cat's tail". When they are hungry, Swedes see a kanelbulle "cinnamon bun" in @ but after a good meal it is just a snabel-A "elephant-trunk A". The French and Italians see snails in @: the French call it an escargot and the Italians, a chiocciola.

Word History: The origin of the symbol @ is the French preposition à "to, at, in" in expressions like: à 2 Euros le kilo "at 2 Euros the kilo". The grave accent over this word lengthened over time until it completely embraced the A itself. As a matter of fact, the use of a meaning "per" in English expressions like "five dollars a pound" and "twenty miles an hour" came to us from French à even before we transmogrified it into @. (Today is National Punctuation Day. Although @ is not punctuation outside e-mail addresses, we thought it an appropriate homage to proper punctuation.)

[Stargzer]

Dr. Goodword is from the generation that always knows where it's @!

[Cacasenno]

To complement (or amend?) the information over chiocciola, ‘snail‘, apparently the sign @ was in current usage in Venice, where modern double-entry accounting was introduced, and the there is proof of it being used in the Year Of The Lord 1492 (!), see attached picture, as a shorthanded recognized unit reference for whatever product described in the account record.
According to this research (cp, Stabile, Scuola Paleografica Romana, Roman Palegraphic School), the sign is much older (Roman but more probably Mediterranean) and is representing an amphora (as unit of measure?).

[Perry]

In Israel the @ is called a "strudel".

[Cacasenno]

as in @ for apfel, in all evidence

[bnjtokyo]

The translations with this Goodword are turning out to be quite useful. I occasionally have to call internationally to people whose native language I cannot speak but whose command of English is limited. When I spellout my email address, the atsign is a frequent stumbling block!

It would be nice to have translations into Korean, Chinese, Thai, Turkish, Urdu、Bahasa Indonesia and Arabic as well. Also, I wonder if all Spanish speakers from Barcelona to Buenos Aires use "arroba" or is there some dialectical variation?