[Dreami]

In German it's called the Kaufmanns-Und (roughly merchant's/salesman's And). I think it may be related to advertising, if you advertise a product name (or a producer name) with an "and" in it, the ampersand is much shorter and more visually appealing

[ainar-g]

Which is consistent with many Romance languages, where it's called a variation of “commercial and”. Including the Italian “e commerciale”, Portuguese “e comercial”, and Spanish “y comercial”.

[charles_f]

And French "Et commercial". It's sometimes written as a form closer to "et", corresponding to the ligature outlined in the article

[bitwize]

That's like how the symbol @ used to be called "commercial at" (this is its Unicode name). This is because of how sales were listed on receipts and such, think "4 apples @ 50¢ each".

[blowski]

"@" has a lot of interesting names - monkey, herring, pig's tail, strudel, mouse, elephant's trunk, and "arroba" (a unit of weight, like a bushel).

[gvx]

Yeah, in Dutch it's "apenstaartje" (little monkey's tail), although the last decades, it's becoming far more common to use the English "at".

[froh]

it's "Klammeraffe" in German, spider monkey, and figuratively a small monkey clinging to / clasping someone or something.

[david927]

It's "zavináč" in Czech -- pickled herring. If you buy them in a jar, they're rolled up, looking a lot like that symbol.

[yesbabyyes]

I kept a collection of names for @ on my first website: https://web.archive.org/web/19981202002949/www.student.nada....

[IggleSniggle]

My favorite name for “@“ is “rogue”

[eurasiantiger]

I prefer ”tourist”

[xpe]

What languages or cultures or regions use this form?

[HillRat]

It's particularly popular in Yendor, I believe.

[anyfoo]

Spread from there to Ancardia and Moria as well, though.

[flawi]

In the 90s/00s it was often referred to as 'miukumauku' in Finnish, roughly translates as 'meowmeow', as in the sound a cat makes, since it somewhat looks like a sleeping cat.

[kotborealis]

In Russian, it's usually called `dog`. No idea why.

[abudabi123]

A dog will always perform a certain spiral inwards walk pattern before it comes to rest on bedding.

[joosters]

I forget the exact details, but I've seen it called a snail in some programming language or other - I remember getting an error message along the lines of 'unexpected snail at line x'! I wish I could recall what language it was - perhaps something verilog related?

[gpas]

In italian we call it "chiocciola", which translates to snail.

[tabtab]

@ "Princess Leia hair"

[sfjailbird]

In the subcontinent, almost everybody pronounces this "at-the-rate-of". I guess they learn this in school or something. Makes you do a double take the first couple of times someone reads you an email adress :)

[jameshart]

Very briefly worked in a metal fabrication shop in the last gasp of pre-CAD and electronic records. Writing out the bill of materials (by hand, to be typed up) involved a lot of numbers - measurements, quantities, and prices.

Using symbols like # before a quantity, @ before a unit price, or ⌀ before a diameter was considered critical for minimizing confusion. I think it was meant to work like a sort of Hungarian notation for numbers, so if someone’s transcribing them into an order form or something, and they find themselves copying a diameter into a price column, they catch themselves on the type mismatch.

It never seemed like there was much room for ambiguity in any of the lists I wrote up, but I guess when you screw up an order to a steel supplier and get the quantity mixed up with the length, that can be a pretty expensive mistake.

[hiccuphippo]

In Spanish the @ is used, mainly in text chat, as both an "a" and an "o" at the same time. Saves time when you want to address both males and females: "amig@s" instead of "amigos y amigas"

[mixmastamyk]

Smart, maybe can displace the harder to read latinx term.

[2Gkashmiri]

as an accountant, i feel that cringe feeling whenever someone says their email john at the rate of gmail.com lol.....

[dwringer]

The @ is sometimes used like "apples, 50¢ @" in which it is read as "each" rather than "at". This may have faded out once email addresses popularized it as "at", but it always made more sense to me since @ looks like an "ea" ligature.

[IggleSniggle]

Ah, I wasn’t aware of this, but it makes a lot of sense! It even looks like it could be a ligature of “eac”, and it’s very natural to imagine a cursive each being abbreviated first to @h and eventually to just @ by a busy clerk.

[formerly_proven]

German uses à for this purpose, there is probably a shared history behind that.

[yesbabyyes]

Its html code is "@".

[bla3]

I always thought it's "amper's and" for that reason, and "amper" must mean "Kaufmann".

[kaichanvong]

as opposed to the appealing German scharfes (ß)

[mccorrinall]

Don’t believe them! ß is not sharp! Do you see any sharp edges there? Me neither! It’s as blunt it can get!

[qbrass]

The curve is a convex edge. The shape provides lower surface area at the point of impact, increasing the surface pressure with the same impact force compared to a straight edge.

[kaichanvong]

the baseline looks close to being a "sharp edge"...

really though, with the "New Book called "What if? 2" by the XKCD creator, can I get him to sign it? given the previous books suggestion: a cure for the common cold, "If everyone on the planet stayed away from each other for a couple of weeks, wouldn't the common cold be wiped out?"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30139925

[pndy]

German class teacher told us once that this particular letter can be called scharfes S and eszett

Was kinda amusing when the "less involved" classmates were trying to read it as B

[kaichanvong]

it's from (serif-like) handwriting really... it's easy to see that given people "describe" the as being scharfes of the entity `ß`