Word of the month: dingbat

One of the joys of the digital era is the way it creates innovations in multiple languages. The “at” sign used in email addresses—@—has, for instance, earned a delightful variety of descriptions, from being called an elephant’s trunk (snabel-a) in Danish to a spider monkey (Klammeraffe) in German or a snail (chiocciola) in Italian. The internet also abounds, however, with all manner of symbols that haven’t as yet earned popular linguistic recognition: from the "vertical pipe with a hole in it" to the "checked ballot box," and so on. For these, a word first coined in the early 19th century has come to the rescue: “dingbats.”

Since its first appearance in America in 1838, a “dingbat” has referred, among other things, to money, a professional tramp, a muffin, male genitalia, an Italian, a woman who is neither your sister nor your mother, a foolish person in authority and—most crucially for our purposes—a typographical ornamentation. If only English had showed a similar level of ingenuity when it came to naming the @.