The @ symbol

THE HISTORY OF THE @ SIGN

The @ symbol, used by grocers and accountants throughout the English-speaking world to indicate a rate, or cost per unit, as in “10 gal @ $3.95/gal” (ten gallons at three dollars and ninety-five cents per gallon), has become the delimiter in e-mail addresses, separating the user’s name from the domain name.

Although the change from at meaning “for a given amount per” to at meaning “in a specified (electronic) location” comes fairly naturally to English speakers, it does not for native speakers of other languages, for whom neither at nor @ meant anything until e-mail came around.

Indeed, a fair number of Internet users live in countries that don’t use the same alphabet English does (Japan, China, former republics of the Soviet Union including Russia, and Arabic-speaking countries, to name some major ones), and where the keyboards did not include the @ character until after its widespread use on the Internet made it a necessity.

As a result, while in some languages @ is simply called "at", in others, a wide variety of interesting nicknames have been developed for this little symbol. Most are based on the shape of the character, others are more abstract.

Metaphors range from
animals (snail, worm, little dog, horse, duckling)
to body parts (elephant’s trunk, monkey’s tail, cat’s foot, pig’s ear)
to food (strudel, cinnamon roll, pretzel).

Here you are another well-known examples:

In Basque, it is called "a bildua" (wrapped “a”).

In Catalan, it is called 'arrova' (which means a unit of measure), or 'ensaïmada' (because of the similar shape of this food speciality)

In Spanish and In Portuguese it is called 'arroba'. It denotes a pre-metric unit of weight and both the weight and the symbol are called arroba.

In French, it is arrobase or arrobe or “a” commercial . Same origin as Spanish, which could be derived from Arabic, ar-roub.