כרוכית (krukhit) — the @ sign; strudel pastry

Etymology

The Hebrew root כ.ר.כ (k-r-kh) conveys wrapping or rolling. In 1913 the Va'ad HaLashon HaIvrit coined כרוכית for the Austro-Hungarian pastry Strudel — thin sheets of dough with a filling that is literally "rolled up" inside — because the German name itself derives from the word for whirlpool. The public ignored the coinage and kept calling the pastry shtrodel.

The @ symbol has a separate history. Its first documented appearance is in a 1536 letter from the Florentine merchant Francesco Lapi, writing from Seville to Rome, where he used it as an abbreviation for the Spanish/Portuguese unit of weight arroba (roughly 11.5 kg), a word derived from the Arabic al-rub' ("the quarter"). By the 17th century French merchants adopted @ to mean "each at a price of," and English commerce followed in the 18th century with the reading "at."

The symbol's digital career began in 1971 when American engineer Ray Tomlinson, working at BBN Technologies on the ARPANET, chose @ to separate a username from a host machine in email addresses — it was the only keyboard character that unambiguously meant "at" and appeared in no proper name. Email reached Israel around 1982, and Hebrew speakers first called the sign shablul (שבלול, "snail"), then shtrodel (שטרודל) through the 1990s, likely reinforced by the visual resemblance between the glyph and a cross-section of rolled pastry. Other languages coined their own folk names in those years: Dutch apenstaartje ("monkey's tail"), Italian chiocciola ("snail"), Greek papaki ("little duck"), Hungarian kukac ("worm"), Russian sobaka ("dog").

In August 1999 the Academy of the Hebrew Language convened a punctuation-marks committee with the Israel Standards Institute. The committee initially proposed siman mishari (סימן מסחרי, "commercial sign"), a poor calque of the English "commercial at." The plenary session in Jerusalem rejected this and revived the dormant 1913 word krukhit as the official Hebrew name for @. Use of krukhit for the sign has been growing steadily, though shtrodel remains dominant in everyday speech.

Key Quotes

"בחרתי להוסיף לסוף שם המשתמש את הסימן @ ואז את שם השרת. שואלים אותי הרבה למה בחרתי בסימן @, אך סימן זה פשוט היה הגיוני." — Ray Tomlinson, on inventing email addressing

"בעוד שנראה כי אין כל סיכוי שישראלים ישתמשו במילה 'כרוכית' לתאור מאפים, השימוש בה לתיאור הסימן עולה בהדרגה." — Elon Gilad, Haaretz column

Timeline

• 1536: First documented use of @ in Francesco Lapi's letter from Seville
• 1913: Va'ad HaLashon coins כרוכית for strudel pastry; public ignores it
• 1971: Ray Tomlinson uses @ in the first networked email address
• 1982: Email arrives in Israel; Israelis begin calling @ shablul then shtrodel
• 1999: Academy of the Hebrew Language officially adopts כרוכית for the @ sign

Related Words

• שטרודל — German-origin loanword, still dominant for @
• שבלול — "snail," an early Hebrew nickname for @
• כרוך — "wrapped," from the same root כ.ר.כ