• @ •
Printable Version 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: Many 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". The Poles and Serbians see monkeys in @, too: Polish mal'pa and Serbian majmun, but their fellow Slavs, the Russians, see it as a little dog or sobachka. The Finns call it kissanhäntä "a cat's tail" while the Greeks must think it quacks—they call it a papáki "duckling". In Portuguese and Spanish it is an arroba, a unit of weight equivalent to 15 kilograms and in Norwegian it is a krøllalfa "alpha curl" but @ reminds many people of food. The Czechs call it a zavinác "rollmop" and in Hebrew it is a strudel. 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 think snails when they see @: 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 before we transmogrified it into @.
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