Monkey Tail
Also called: amphora, sling-a, at or monkey
The hyphen (@) is used in e-mail addresses as a separator for the personal alias and the domain name of the receiving mail server. In English, this character is referred to simply as at. In ICT, especially within programming languages, there are other uses for the apestail.
Origin of the monkey tail
In documents from the sixteenth century, the @ sign is already found as an abbreviation for amphora. This Greek word for jar was at that time a unit of measurement. After that, the sign had further arithmetic and administrative uses.
In the 1970s, when programmer Ray Tomlinson was working on a system to exchange messages between computers via ARPANET, a precursor to the Internet, he chose the monkey tail as a symbol to separate in addresses of computers the name of the person and the name of the server.
Except as part of e-mail addresses, the monkey tail is well known on Twitter, where the symbol can be placed before a user's name to link them in a message.
Monkey tail in other languages
Each language has its own designation for the @ sign. In many cases, that designation is derived from what the symbol looks like. Some examples of translations of the word monkey sign:
- English: at
- German: Klammeraffe (swinging monkey)
- French: arobas or arobase
- Italian: chiocciola (snail)
- Spanish and Portuguese: arroba
- Basque: bildua (circled a)
- Luxembourgish: Afeschwanz (monkey tail)
- Danish and Swedish: snabel-a (trunk-a) or grishale (pigtail)
- Finnish: kissanhäntä (cattail)
- Irish: ag
- Czech and Slovak: zavináč (rolmops)
- Greek: papaki (duckling)
- Turkish: et
- Russian: sobaka (dog)
- African: aapstert
- Armenian: shnik (puppy)
- Bulgarian: klyomba (misspelled letter)
