Information about @

@  •  • [ e] Punctuation
apostrophe ( ’ ' ) brackets ( ), [ ], { }, < > colon ( : ) comma ( , ) dashes ( ‒, –, —, ― ) ellipsis ( …, ... ) exclamation mark ( ! ) full stop/period ( . ) guillemets ( ' ' ) hyphen ( -, ‐ ) question mark ( ? ) quotation marks ( ‘ ’, “ ” ) semicolon ( ; ) slash/stroke ( / ) solidus ( ∕ )
Interword separation
spaces ( ) ( ) ( ) interpunct ( )
General typography
ampersand ( & ) asterisk ( * ) at ( @ ) backslash ( \ ) bullet ( • ) caret ( ^ ) currency ( ) , $, €, , , ₩, ₪ dagger/obelisk ( † ) ( ‡ ) degree ( ) dele ( ) emoticons (☻ ) inverted exclamation point ( ) inverted question mark ( ) number sign ( # ) numero sign ( № ) percent and related signs ( %, ‰, ‱ ) pilcrow ( ) prime ( ′ ) section sign ( ) tilde/swung dash ( ~ ) umlaut/diaeresis ( ) underscore/understrike ( _ ) vertical/pipe/broken bar ( |, )
Uncommon typography
asterism ( ⁂ ) index/fist ( ☞ ) therefore sign ( ∴ ) lozenge ( ◊ ) heart ( ♥ ) interrobang ( ‽ ) irony mark ( ؟ ) reference mark ( ※ ) sarcasm mark

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 "7 widgets @ $2 ea. = $14". More recently, the at symbol has become ubiquitous because of its use in e-mail 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 (see below). 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.

History

It is not known which particular word gave rise to the modern at sign, although there are several theories, including:

• In the Middle Ages, used by monks to shorten the Latin word ad which means "at, toward, or by." It also means about when followed by a numeral, though no Latin document showing the @ symbol used in this way is known.
• In the 1400s for the Spanish unit of weight arroba = "jar".
• An abbreviation of the Greek preposition ανά (ana), which means 'at the rate of' when used with numerals, exactly its modern commercial usage.
• An Italian academic claims to have traced the @ symbol back to the Italian Renaissance in a Venetian mercantile document signed by Francesco Lapi on May 4, 1537.^[1] The document talks about commerces with Pizarro and in particular the price of an @ of wine in Peru, where @ stood for amphora (Italian anfora; Spanish and Portuguese arroba). The word arroba still means both the at symbol and a unit of weight (see below). Under this view, the symbol was used to represent one amphora, which was a unit of weight or volume based upon the capacity of the standard terra cotta jar, and came into use with the modern meaning "at the rate of" in northern Europe.

• From Norman French "à" meaning "at" in the sense of "each". "2 widgets à £5.50 = £11.00" is the sort of accountancy shorthand notation you will see on English commercial vouchers and ledgers all the way into the 1990s, where the usage was superseded for accountants with its email usage. It is also used in this way in Modern French and Swedish. According to this view, the at symbol is simply a stylish way of writing the à, so as not to remove the hand from the page in making the symbol. You can see hybrids between @ and à in French handwriting in street markets to this day.
• It could be the abbreviation of any word beginning in a, and more than one such symbol was likely in use, but there is no continuous record between any of the possibilities and the modern symbol.

The @ was present on the Lambert, a single element typewriter manufactured in 1902 by Lambert Typewriter Company of New York. Its inclusion in the original 1963 ASCII character set seems to have been unremarkable, so it was probably a standard character on commercial typewriters by that time. For example, the IBM Selectric typewriter, introduced in 1961, featured the @ symbol in its now-familiar location on the "2" key.

Modern uses

In modern English, @ is a commercial symbol, meaning at or at the rate of. It has been used, rarely, in financial documents or grocers' price tags. It is not used in standard typography.^[2]

Its most familiar modern use is in e-mail addresses (sent by SMTP), as in jdoe@example.com ("the user named ‘jdoe’ working at the computer named ‘example’ in the ‘com’ domain"). Ray Tomlinson is credited with the introduction of this use in 1972. This idea of the symbol representing located at in the form user@host is seen in many other tools and protocols as well: for example, the command ssh jdoe@www.example.com tries to establish a ssh connection to the computer with the hostname www.example.com using the username jdoe.

The @ is used in various programming languages though there is not a consistent theme to its usage. For example, in Perl, @ prefixes variables which contain arrays; in PHP, it is used just before a function to make the interpreter suppress errors that would be generated when using that function; in C#, @ is the literal string operator meaning that the string should be used "as is" and not be processed for escape sequences; in Java, it is used to denote annotations (sometimes called metadata) since version 5.0; in Ruby, @ prefixes instance variables, and @@ prefixes class variables.

In architecture, @ is used as a symbol meaning "every". For example, the phrase 2x4 @ 16" O.C. would denote placement of a 2x4 every 16" on center.

In modal logic, specifically when representing possible worlds, @ is sometimes used as a logical symbol to denote the actual world (the world we are 'at').

The @ is used as an alternative political spelling for typing in some Romance languages as a gender-neutral substitute for the masculine "o" in mixed gender groups and in cases where the gender is unknown. For example, the Spanish word "amigos," which could either mean male and female "friends" or all male "friends" would be replaced with "amig@s." The character is intended to resemble a mix of the masculine letter "o" and the feminine "a". The usefulness of this is debated; in Spanish the masculine grammatical gender may include both males and females, while the feminine gender is exclusive to females, and there is no neutral gender for most nouns. Some advocates of gender-neutral language-modification feel that using the male grammatical gender as a generic gender indicates an implicit linguistic disregard for women. Many Spanish speakers feel that this use of the @ degrades their language, and some allege that it is an example of cultural imperialism. This construction is generally only used in informal writing. There is no established pronunciation of this writing. Alternative forms would be amigos/as and amigⒶs using the circle-A of anarchism.

In most roguelike games (such as Angband and NetHack), @ denotes the player character. Some roguelikes also use @ to denote any human. This usage may be because @ has a passing resemblance to a top down view of a person's head and shoulders.

The @ is also used sometimes (for example in articles relating to missing persons, obituaries, or brief reports) to denote an alias after a person's proper name, for instance: "John Smith @ Jean Smyth".

The @ may sometimes be used to represent a schwa, as the actual schwa character "ə" may be difficult to produce in many computers. It is used in this capacity in the ASCII IPA or Kirshenbaum IPA scheme.

In online discourse, the @ is used by some anarchists as a substitute for the traditional circle-A .

It is frequently used in Leet as a substitute for the letter A.

In Malagasy, @ is an informal abbreviation for amin'ny.

"Commercial at" in other languages

In most languages other than English, @ was less common before e-mail became widespread in the mid-1990s, although most typewriters included the symbol. Consequently, it is often perceived in those languages as denoting "The Internet", computerization, or modernization in general.

• In Basque it is called a bildua ("rounded a")
• In Belarusian it's called "сьлімак" ("helix", "snail")
• In Bulgarian it is called кльомба ("klyomba", means nothing else) or маймунско а (majmunsko a "monkey A").
• In Catalan it is called arrova or ensaïmada, the roll brioche typical from Majorca.
• In Chinese
• In mainland China it is quan a (圈a), meaning "circular a" or hua a (花a, lacy a).
• In Taiwan it is xiao laoshu (小老鼠), meaning "little mouse", or laoshu hao (老鼠號, "mouse sign").
• In Croatian it is informally called manki, coming from the local pronunciation of monkey. Curiously, the Croatian word for monkey, majmun, is not used to denote the at sign. This leads many Croatian speakers to believe that the English term for at sign is monkey causing them to misuse the word when communicating in English.
• In Czech and Slovak it is called zavináč (rollmops).
• In Danish it is snabel-a ("(elephant's) trunk-a").
• In Dutch it is called apenstaartje ("little monkey-tail").
• In Esperanto it is called ĉe-signo ("at" - for the e-mail use, with an address pronounced zamenhof ĉe esperanto punkto org), po-signo ("each" -- refers only to the mathematical use) or heliko ("snail").
• In Faroese it is kurla (sounds "curly"), hjá ("at"), tranta and snápila ("(elephant's) trunk-a").
• In Finnish it was originally called taksamerkki ("fee sign") or yksikköhinnan merkki ("unit price sign"), but these names are long obsolete and now rarely understood. Nowadays, it is officially ät-merkki, according to the national standardization institute SFS; frequently also spelled "at-merkki". Other names include kissanhäntä, ("cat's tail") and miukumauku ("the miaow sign").
• In French it is arobase or arrobe or a commercial (though this is most commonly used in French-speaking Canada), and sometimes a dans le rond (a in the circle). Same origin as Spanish which could be derived from Arabic, ar-roub.
• In German it sometimes used to be referred to as Klammeraffe (meaning "spider monkey"). Klammeraffe refers to the similarity of the @ to the tail of a monkey grabbing a branch. Lately, it is mostly called at just like in English
• In Greek, it is most often referred to as papaki (παπάκι), meaning "duckling," due to the similarity it bears with comic character designs for ducks.
• In Greenlandic Inuit language - it is called aajusaq meaning "a-like" or "something that looks like a"
• In Hebrew it is colloquially known as shtrudel (שטרודל). The normative term, invented by the Academy of the Hebrew Language, is krukhit (כרוכית), which is a Hebrew word for strudel.
• In Hungarian it is officially called kukac ("worm, mite, or maggot").
• In Icelandic it is referred to as "at merkið (the at-sign)" or "hjá" which is a direct translation of at.
• In Indonesian it is et,a bundar, meaning "circle A".
• In Italian it is chiocciola ("snail"), sometimes at (pronounced more often /ɛt/, and rarely /at/, instead of /æt/) or ad.
• In Japanese it is called attomāku (アットマーク, "at mark"). The word is a wasei-eigo, which are Japanese vocabulary forged from the English language or Gairaigo foreign loan words in general. It is sometimes called naruto, because of Naruto whirlpool or food (kamaboko).
• In Korean it is called golbaeng-i (골뱅이; bai top shells), a dialectal form of daseulgi (다슬기), a small freshwater snail with no tentacles.
• In Latvian it is pronunced same as in English, but, since in Latvian [æ] is written as "e" not "a" (as in English), it's sometimes written as et.
• In Lithuanian it is eta (equivalent to English at but with Lithuanian ending)
• In Luxembourgish it used to be called Afeschwanz (monkey-tail), but due to widespread use it is now pronounced 'at' like in English.
• In Morse Code it is known as a "commat," consisting of the Morse code for the "A" and "C" run together as one character: (.--.-.). This occurred in 2004 .
• In Norwegian it is officially called krøllalfa ("curly alpha" or "alpha twirl"). (The alternate alfakrøll is also common.)
• In Persian it is at (using the English pronunciation).
• In Portuguese it is arroba, similar to Spanish.
• In Polish it is officially called atka, but commonly małpa (monkey) or małpka (little monkey), or bałwanek (little snowman)
• In Romanian it is Coadă de maimuţă (monkey-tail) or "a-rond"
• In Russian sobaka (собака) (dog)
• In Serbian it is called лудо А (ludo A crazy A) or мајмун (majmun monkey)
• In Slovenian it is called afna (little monkey)
• In Spanish it is called "arroba." The symbol used to be used to indicate a unit of weight with the same name (1 arroba = 25 U. S. pounds).
• In Spain, Portugal, Mexico, and Brazil it denotes a pre-metric unit of weight. It variates regionally being about 25 pounds, 11.502 kg, in most parts. The weight and the symbol are called arroba. (In Brazil, cattle is still priced by the arroba — now rounded to 15 kg). It was also used as units of volume for wine and oil.
• In Swedish it is called snabel-a ("(elephant's) trunk-a") or (cinnamon bun)
• In Swiss German it is commonly called Affeschwanz ("monkey-tail").
• In Turkish it is et (using the English pronunciation). Also called as güzel a (beautiful a), özel a (special a), salyangoz (snail), koç (ram), kuyruklu a (a with tail) and çengelli a (a with hook).
• In Ukrainian it is commonly called et ("at"), other names being ravlyk (равлик) (snail), slymachok (слимачок) (little slug), vukho (вухо) (ear) and pesyk (песик) (little dog).
• In Vietnamese it is called a còng (bent a) in the North and a móc (hooked a) in the South.
• In Welsh it is sometimes known as a malwen or malwoden (a snail).

References

External links

• ascii64 - the @ book - free download (creative commons) - by patrik sneyd - foreword by luigi colani (11/2006)
• A Natural History of the @ Sign The many names of the at sign in various languages
• Linguist's view
• Where it's At: names for a common symbol Article at World Wide Words
• Have @it: A history of the @ sign
• UK Telegraph Article: Chinese parents choose to name their baby "@"