HE 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.

"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."

In 1844, Samuel F. B. Morse sent the first Morse code message over a

long-distance telegraph. The phrase "what hath God wrought" traveled

almost instantly from Washington to Baltimore.

Later the code was used by the military to transmit messages over radio

frequencies. Today, a handful of ham radio enthusiasts communicate in

Morse code as a hobby and also use it during power failures.

"This is one of those technologies that never really dies completely,"

said Elliot Sivowitch, a museum specialist emeritus for the Smithsonian

Institution who specializes in radio communications.

But with the rise of e-mail, Morse code must reckon with the @ symbol,

which is essential to every e-mail address.

Ham radio hobbyists use Morse code to exchange e-mail addresses on the air

so that they can trade files or lengthy Web addresses, said Rick

Lindquist, the senior news editor at the American Radio Relay League, the

largest association of amateur radio enthusiasts in the country. "Most of

our members have e-mail capability," he said.

Until now, those ham operators had to spell out @ with two letters of

code: "A," a dot followed by a dash, and "T," a dash. The resulting sound

is "dit-dah-dah," which also translates to the letter "W."

Now the @ symbol is transmitted by combining the letters "A" and "C" and

has a sound not shared by any other single character.

"The irony is that sending the word 'at' is shorter," Mr. Lindquist said.

By about half. Each dash is three times the duration of a dot, and within

a single character, the space between sounds is one dot long. So, the word

'at' takes nine beats, or dots; the @ symbol takes 17.

How radio hobbyists respond to that difference will determine the

popularity of the symbol over the word. So far, the word appears to be

winning.

"I think they designed it wrong," said Herb Sweet, the treasurer of an

amateur radio club in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. "I have a hunch that people are

more than likely to just go A-T - dit-dah-dah."

Mr. Sweet's wife, Barbara, is also a member of the club. In 1976, Mr.

Sweet brought home a ham radio and installed it in their bedroom. Mrs.

Sweet had just purchased an electric knitting machine, so "there was

nothing I could really say," she said. Today, she is the president of the

club.

Ham operators will probably learn the symbol but may opt not to use it,

Mrs. Sweet said.

The Sweets live minutes from the Samuel Morse Historical Site, which sits

on a Victorian-style garden estate in Poughkeepsie called Locust Grove.

"He's right down the road here, Samuel, F. B.," Mrs. Sweet said. "We go by

him every day."

Locust Grove offers an introductory course in telegraphy for children but

has not incorporated the @ symbol into it, said Andrew Stock, the curator

of education and public programs. "It's an interesting factoid," he said.

"It probably won't be part of our programming."

Mr. Stock said his course was designed to give children a quick primer on

sending messages in Morse code and that the sequence for @ was beyond the

scope of the lesson.

Many Morse code users learn punctuation to earn their radio licenses but

ignore it later, during actual communication. "There are symbols for

things like the semicolon," said Larry Price, the president of the

International Amateur Radio Union. "But not one in a hundred Morse

operators could even tell you what the character is, because they don't

ever use it."

Sal Citrano, a retired Navy radio man who served during World War II, said

that punctuation was rarely used in federal transmissions at sea.

"Military messages used to come in five-letter words," he said. "There

were no commas, dashes or anything."

Mr. Citrano, 78, spent five months in radio training school in Newport,

R.I., before boarding a transport bound for Normandy. He listened to and

decoded the Morse code message sent by James Forrestal, the Secretary of

the Navy, on Aug. 15, 1945, informing his ship that the war had ended.

Today, he has a valid radio license but spends little time on the air.

"Now that I have a computer, I'm not active," he said.