Magnetic monopoles develop "abelian" singularities in rather general situations. At first, this was seen as a somewhat embarrassing fact by physicists, yet singular monopoles have become important in recent applications of gauge theory to geometry. In this talk, I will review singular monopoles in euclidean space, and explain how they are described by a complex curve with a signed intersection divisor. I will also discuss how these data can be calculated in the case of "nonabelian" charge two, as well as some features of their behaviour under deformations of the singularity locus.