A Chinese couple tried to name their baby "@" after claiming the character used in e-mail addresses echoed their love for the child, an official said today.
"The whole world uses it to write e-mail, and translated into Chinese it means 'love him'," the father explained, according to the deputy chief of the State Language Commission Li Yuming.
The unusual name stands out, especially in Chinese, which has no alphabet and instead uses tens of thousands of multi-stroke characters to represent words.
While the "@" symbol is familiar to Chinese e-mail users, they often use the English word "at" to sound it out - which with a drawn out "t" sounds something like "ai ta", or "love him", to Mandarin speakers.
Mr Li said the name was an extreme example of people's increasingly adventurous approach to Chinese, as commercialisation and the Internet break down conventions.
Mr Li did not say if officials accepted the "@" name. But earlier this year the government announced a ban on names using Arabic numerals, foreign languages and symbols that do not belong to Chinese minority languages.
Sixty million Chinese faced the problem that their names use ancient characters so obscure that computers cannot recognise them and even fluent speakers were confused, said Mr Li.