Prentiss Riddle: Language

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At, arroba, Affenschwanz

I finally found the answer to something that's been puzzling me: what do people call the "at" sign in other languages?

Thanks to Scott Herron's "Natural History of the At Sign" and Webopedia's "History of the @ Sign", I now know that it is called arroba (a unit of weight) in Spanish and some other Romance languages (e.g., arobase in French). Germans call it the Affenschwanz, or monkey's tail, with variations on that theme common elsewhere in Europe. Other languages call it "commercial A" or something more idiosyncratic -- snail, pig's ear, elephant's trunk, or just "uh".

This all came up because I decided to put e-mail addresses from comments in this blog in a form unfriendly to spambots, and I wanted something more obscure than "jdoe AT foo DOT com". So now commenters' addresses will be recognizable only to Spanish-speaking spambots.

language 2003.04.17 link