The snail, the monkey, and the little duck

Here is a small thing you know how to use but probably cannot name. It sits above the 2 on your keyboard, it anchors every email address ever written, and if a stranger asked you what it is called, in English, you would reach for something clumsy — "the at sign," maybe, which is really just a description of what it does. For a symbol we type dozens of times a day, @ is oddly nameless.

That namelessness turns out to be the whole story. Because when email made this curl of ink suddenly unavoidable in the 1970s, every language on earth had the same little problem you just had — what do we call this? — and the answers they came up with are one of the most charming surveys of the human imagination anywhere in language. Nobody agreed. Everybody looked at the same shape and saw something from their own kitchen, farmyard, or zoo.

A snail in Rome, a monkey in Amsterdam

Start in Italy, where the @ is a chiocciola — a snail. Once you have heard it you cannot unhear it: the little creature curled inside its own spiral shell. The Dutch went to the same shape and saw a different animal, calling it apenstaartje, "little monkey's tail," the tail looping back on itself. Germans agreed it was a monkey but a clingier one — Klammeraffe, the "clinging" or spider monkey wrapped around a branch.

Head north and the animal changes again. In Danish and Swedish the sign is snabel-a — an "elephant's-trunk a," the loop read as a trunk curling up from the letter. Cross to Finland and it becomes a kissanhäntä, a cat's tail (Finns will also cheerfully call it miukumauku, a nonsense word built from the sound a cat makes). In Greece it is a παπάκι (papaki), a little duck. In Russia, most affectionately of all, it is a собачка (sobachka) — a little dog, so thoroughly that Russian speakers dictate an address as "name, little-dog, host."

The same mark, and no two peoples saw the same thing in it: a snail, a monkey, an elephant, a cat, a duck, a dog — each language borrowing a creature it already loved.

And the menagerie keeps going once you leave animals behind. Hungarians, unsentimentally, named it kukac — a worm, or a maggot. Czechs and Slovaks looked at the curl and saw lunch: zavináč, a rollmop, the rolled fillet of pickled herring. Hebrew speakers saw a pastry and call it שטרודל (shtrudel), a strudel seen end-on. Koreans named it 골뱅이 (golbaengi), a sea snail or whelk; speakers of Mandarin often say 小老鼠 (xiǎo lǎoshǔ), "little mouse." Poles kept it simple with małpa, "monkey," and Norwegians got mathematical: krøllalfa, a "curly alpha." The linguist Karen Steffen Chung, at National Taiwan University, has spent years collecting these names, and the list runs to dozens — a whole bestiary conjured out of a single stroke of the pen.

The sign is much older than email

All of this naming was, in a sense, catch-up. The reason so many languages had to improvise a word in living memory is that the symbol arrived in ordinary life much faster than any name could. But the mark itself is old — far older than the computer, older than the typewriter.

For years its origins were murky, until in 2000 an Italian historian of science, Giorgio Stabile of La Sapienza University in Rome, went looking and found it hiding in the archives. In a letter written by a Florentine merchant named Francesco Lapi and dated 4 May 1536, Stabile spotted an unmistakable @ — used to mean an amphora, the two-handled clay jar that doubled as a standard unit of measure along Mediterranean trade routes. "There," Lapi wrote, "an @ of wine, which is one thirtieth of a barrel, is worth 70 or 80 ducats." The sign, Stabile argued, was a flourish of the mercantile script that Italian traders developed between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance — a quick, looping shorthand for a word they wrote all day long (Stabile, reported in The Guardian, 2000).

That merchant's meaning — a thing at a certain price, "at the rate of" — is the thread that survived. For centuries @ lived quietly in exactly one place: the account books of grocers and traders, where "12 apples @ 2d" meant twelve apples at twopence each. It was so specialised that it earned a spot on the keyboard of commercial typewriters and stayed there, a little-used key, waiting.

The accident that made it famous

Waiting, it turned out, for a computer engineer in a hurry. In 1971, at the firm Bolt Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a programmer named Ray Tomlinson was working out how to send a message from one computer to another across the fledgling ARPANET. He needed a character to sit between the name of a person and the name of the machine they were on — something to say this user, at that host — and it had to be a character that could never turn up inside somebody's name and cause confusion.

He looked down at his keyboard and there was @: unused by any programming language, absent from every name, idle except for grocers and accountants. And it already meant "at." Tomlinson picked it almost offhandedly, wrote the first user@host address, and in doing so quietly fixed the shape of every email address that would ever be written. (His reaction, and his colleague's, was not triumph but caution: "Don't tell anyone," the story goes — "this isn't what we're supposed to be working on.") Half a century later, that arbitrary choice is on a billion business cards.

And it was that — email, spreading language by language across the world — that forced everyone else's hand. A symbol that had been a merchant's private squiggle was suddenly on every screen, read aloud in every classroom and call centre, and each language had days, not centuries, to decide what to call it. So they did the fastest, most human thing available: they looked at the shape and named it after something they already knew.

What a snail teaches about words

This is where the @ stops being a piece of trivia and starts being a small lesson in how words are actually made. Watch a dozen languages name the same mark and you are watching, in fast-forward and out in the open, the thing that usually takes centuries and happens invisibly: a word is not a fact of nature but an agreement a group decides to keep. There is nothing snail-like in @ that obliged Italians to say chiocciola; the Greeks looked at the identical curl and firmly saw a duck. The name is a convention — a promise a community makes that this sound will point at that thing — which is the same reason, as we've written before, that the same idea is oiseau, Vogel and pájaro depending on where you're standing.

But notice how each community reached its agreement. Nobody invented a brand-new sound for the @. Every language named the unfamiliar by grabbing something deeply familiar — a snail, a tail, a trunk, a pastry — and hanging the new thing on the old hook. That is not a quirk of the @ story. It is the oldest trick in vocabulary, the way a "mouse" got its second meaning and a computer got a "web." We understand the new by tying it to the known.

Which is also, as it happens, the most reliable way to make a foreign word stick. Memory does not hold isolated facts well, but it holds connections beautifully. When you meet a new word and lash it to a vivid image or a thing you already know — the way a Roman lashed @ to a snail — you give it a hook to hang on, and it stays. Psychologists call the deliberate version of this the keyword method, and it is one of the best-evidenced tricks in language learning. The whole world just demonstrated it for us, one duck and one strudel at a time.

Where vocabla fits

The @ sign got its hundred names because a hundred communities each connected an unfamiliar shape to something they already carried in their heads. That is exactly the move a learner has to make with every new word — and doing it word by word, alone, is slow. vocabla is built to make that connection for you and keep it alive: it teaches the words you actually need in French, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian as whole units met inside real sentences, so a new word arrives already hooked to a context and an image rather than floating free as a bare translation — and then it brings each one back, spaced across days, until the hook holds on its own.

So the next time you rattle off your email address, spare a thought for the little snail — or the monkey, or the duck — living inside it. It is proof, sitting right there in your inbox, that words are things people make, together, by connecting the strange to the familiar. Which is precisely the skill you are practising every time you learn one.