symbols, acronyms & abbreviations

@

1

arroba ? – present.

2

anifora The earliest known record of its use is that found by Giorgio Stabile in a letter written by a Florentine merchant on 4 May 1536.

How did the symbol for a unit become part of internet urls?

In 1885, the @ symbol appeared on the Underwood typewriter keyboard.

In 1971, during the development of the mail system in ARPAnet, Ray Tomlinson decided to distinguish between local addressees and those at some other host. The external addresses were named by inserting @ before the name of the "foreign" host. He chose the @ symbol because it was available on the keyboard, would not be expected to occur in the names of persons or domains and from the appropriateness of the commercial sense of "at".

Spanish speaking teenagers began to use the character in text messaging to create gender-free words: “Holla amig@s!”

Most of these are taken from a survey conducted on The Linguist List by Karen Steffen Chung; see linguistlist.org/issues/11/11-1740.html#1

Locale/Language	Word	Meaning
Afrikaans	aapstert	monkey's tail
Catalan	arrova	from the unit of measure
China (Cantonese)	at
Slovak	zavinàc	rollmops (rolled pickled fish)
Czech	zavinác
Danish	snabel-a	(elephant's) trunk-a
Danish	grisehale	pig's tail
Dutch	at
	apestaartje or apestaart	monkey's tail
	a-krul	a-curl
English	at
English	round at	proofreader use
Finnish	miau merkki	meow mark
French	arobase
	a escargot	snail
	a enroule
	a commercial
Frisian	apesturtsje	monkey's tail
German	Klammeraffe	spider monkey
German	Ohr	ear
Hebrew	shtrudel	strudel
Hebrew	shablul	snail
Hungarian	kukac	maggot
Italian	chiocciola	snail
Japanese	atto maaku	at mark
Korean	dalphaengi	snail
Norwegian
Polish	malpa	monkey
	kotek	little cat
	ucho s'wini	pig's ear
Portuguese	arroba	from the unit
Romanian	la	at
Russian	sobachka	little dog
Spanish	arroba	a unit
Swedish	kanelbulle	cinnamon roll
Swedish	snabel-A	(elephant's) trunk a