A Chinese couple have applied to name their child @.
The country's State Language Commission, which has not said if it will accept the name, said the couple claimed the character echoed their love for their newborn.
If pronounced as in English, @ sounds similar to 'ai ta' or 'love him' in Mandarin Chinese.
While familiar to email users around the world, the symbol stands out especially in Mandarin, which has no alphabet and instead uses tens of thousands of multi-stroke characters to represent words.
The commission said that the name was an extreme example of Chinese people's increasingly adventurous approach to language, as commercialisation and the Internet break down conventions.
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.
