We discuss the origin, an improved definition and the key reciprocity property of the trilinear symbol introduced by Rédei [16] in the study of 8-ranks of narrow class groups of quadratic number fields. It can be used to show that such 8-ranks are ‘governed’ by Frobenius conditions on the primes dividing the discriminant, a fact used in the recent work of A. Smith [18, 19]. In addition, we explain its impact in the progress towards proving my conjectural density for solvability of the negative Pell equation
\[{x^2} - d{y^2} = - 1\]
.