The @ symbol was added to Morse code in 2004
It was added in May 2004, it’s the first new symbol since the Second World War, and the French have a cute name for it. The rest of Morse code has some surprising omissions.
At the weekend, a friend spotted a “fun fact” at a café: that the @ symbol was added to Morse code in 2009, and was the first new addition since World War II. This fact goes around the Internet periodically, but it’s only half-right.
When was the @ symbol added to Morse code?
I found some news sites reporting the change – it was actually added in 2004, not 2009.
Here’s a New York Times article from April 2004, written by Mark Glassman:
The French say petit escargot; the Dutch call it a monkey’s tail. On a qwerty keyboard, it’s Shift-2. And next month, amateur radio enthusiasts will call it dit-dah-dah-dit-dah-dit.
That is when the symbol @ officially becomes the newest character in the Morse code.
And here’s an Associated Press article from March the same year:
[Morse code] now has a new character to denote the “@” symbol used in e-mail addresses.
In December, the International Telecommunications Union, which oversees the entire frequency spectrum, from amateur radio to satellites, voted to add the new character.
The stories explain that it was added because of email – ham radio operators would exchange email addresses so they could exchange files and long web addresses, which are difficult or impossible to share with Morse code.
Is this really the first new symbol since WWII?
The NYT story quotes an ITU spokesman:
“As far as we know, this is the first change to the code in at least 60 years,” said Gary Fowlie, a spokesman for the International Telecommunication Union, the arm of the United Nations that will oversee the update, which is to become official on May 3. “There is a need for it.”
And the AP story has a similar quote:
The new sign is the first in at least several decades, and possibly much longer. Among ITU officials and Morse code aficionados, no one could remember any other addition.
“It’s a pretty big deal,” said Paul Rinaldo, chief technical officer for the American Radio Relay League, the national association for amateur radio operators. “There certainly hasn’t been any change since before World War II.”
What is the @ symbol in Morse code?
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) have a specification for Morse code, M.1677. The first version M.1677-0 was published in May 2004, and includes the @ symbol, which it describes as “commercial at”:
Commercial at ………………………………………… [@] . – – . – .
It’s a digraph made from a (. –) and c (– . – .) This is longer than spelling out the word “at” (. – –).
Some speculate that it stands for “a[t] c[ommercial]”, but I couldn’t find an official confirmation. It might just be a clever backronym that’s caught on.
What is the @ symbol called?
M.1677 includes this footnote:
In December 2002, the French General Committee on Terminology approved the term “arobase” for the @ symbol used in e-mail addresses.
I find that a rather delightful word, although I’ve never heard anybody use it! There’s a BBC News article that says very similar – and a dictionary maker said they weren’t going to include it until people started using it. I wonder if they ever added it?
The end of the article alludes to other names for the @ symbol, and I found a fun post by Craig Hockenberry that describes the history of the name in more detail.
What other characters should Morse code add?
Here’s the end of the AP story:
Some ham operators wouldn’t mind more changes to spice up the language. While Morse code has a period, a question mark, and even a semicolon, it offers no simple way to articulate excitement.
“I was hoping they’d add a character for the exclamation point,” said Yocanovich, who is active in the International Morse Preservation Society. “It expresses an emotion that’s difficult to get across any other way.”
I’m surprised that it wasn’t included already!