A Chinese couple tried to name their baby "@", claiming the character used in e-mail addresses shows their love for the child.

While the "@" 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.

No information about whether officials accepted the "@" name,but earlier this year the Chinese 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 left scratching their heads.

The at sign (@, read aloud in English as "at") is a typographic symbol used as an abbreviation for "at" in accounting and commercial invoices, in statements such as "3 books @ Rs.2 = Rs.6". More recently, the at symbol has become ubiquitous due to its use in email addresses.

It is often referred to informally as the at symbol, the at sign, or just at. In other languages, the symbol may have a different name. It has the official name commercial at in the ANSI/CCITT/Unicode character encoding standards. However, no formal English term has been officially assigned to this character.