At sign

At sign in Arial font

The at sign (@, read aloud in English as "at") is a typographic symbol most commonly used as an abbreviation in accounting and commercial invoices, in statements such as "7 widgets @ £2 ea. = £14". More recently, the at symbol has become ubiquitous due to its use in email addresses.

It is often referred to informally as the at symbol, the at sign, or just at. It has the official name commercial at in the ANSI/CCITT/Unicode character encoding standards.

The origin of the symbol is debated, but is most likely a cursive form of ā, or possibly à (the French word for 'at').

History

The at sign may have evolved from the Norman French "à"

The at sign appears to be the cursive form of ā, an abbreviation of an unknown word beginning with a. In medieval European manuscripts, abbreviations were generally indicated by drawing a line over or through the letters, as in the common IX for Jesus Christ (see Christogram), or # from lb for libra 'pound'. In the typeface of the Gutenberg Bible, ā stands for either an or am within words. However, it is not known which particular word gave rise to the modern at sign.

Some linguists say the at sign first appeared in the Middle Ages, when monks used it to shorten the Latin word ad which means "at, toward, or by." Others claim that the at sign stood for the measurement of weight in Spain in the 1400s. The measurement was "a jar" or an arroba, of something. Yet another contingent says the at sign was used by market sellers in the 1700s to show how much something might cost. They put signs like "5 potatoes @ 10 pence" in front of their stands.

A commonly accepted theory is that the symbol is derived from the Latin preposition ad, which means about with numerals. However, no document showing this usage has been presented.

A similar idea is that the at sign is the abbreviation of the Greek preposition ana (ανά), which means 'at the rate of' when used with numerals, exactly its modern commercial usage.

A more recent idea has been proposed by Giorgio Stabile, a professor of history in Rome. He claims to have traced the symbol back to the Italian Renaissance in a Venetian mercantile document signed by Francesco Lapi on May 4, 1536. 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.

However, the at sign 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.

An alternative view is that it derives 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 used in this way in Modern French also.

Evolution of the at sign

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.

The French call the symbol, among other things, "at" bâclé (using its English form). It may be that this is a deliberate pun on "atbash clé" - i.e. the ancient Hebrew key or cypher atbash - using a reversed alphabet - is to be used to decipher a hidden item of the text. There may even be a similar code indication of the ampersand - reading in German and French "am persan[d]" - i.e. "to Persian" - suggesting a language translation or perhaps reading R to L.

The at symbol 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.

Modern uses

In modern English, the at sign 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.

The symbol's most familiar modern use is in e-mail addresses (sent by SMTP), as in [email protected] ("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 1976. This idea of user@host is seen in many other tools and protocols as well: for example, the command ssh [email protected] tries to establish a ssh connection to the computer with the hostname www.example.com using the username jdoe.

In the programming language Perl, the symbol prefixes variables which contain arrays, as opposed to scalar values (indicated with '$') and hash tables / associative arrays ('%'). If the code were to be treated as a sentence, this prefix would be the equivalent of a determiner, so "@animals" might be read as "these animals".

In the programming language PHP, the at sign can be placed just before a function to make the interpreter suppress errors that would be generated when using that function.

In the IRC protocol, the at sign is the symbol for a channel operator. IRC also uses the user@host form (often preceded by nick!) for identifying and banning users. In this case the user@ part was originally an ident response and the host part was a reverse dns name from the user's IP. However, most modern IRC networks provide some mechanism for users to hide their real reverse dns hostname and/or for admins/privileged users to pick one arbitrarily.

The at symbol is also 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. 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 a similar fashion, Pokémon fans often write "Lati@s" to denote Latios and Latias.

In most roguelike games (such as Angband and NetHack), the at sign is used to denote the player character. Some roguelike games also use the sign to denote any human.

The at sign 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 at sign 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 at sign 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 the MMORPG game MapleStory, players who buy and sell items use long strings of at signs to heighten their chat bubbles and make their messages easier to see. The at sign is very wide compared to other ASCII characters, making it practical for this purpose.

In Malagasy, the at sign is an informal abbreviation for amin'ny.

"Commercial at" in other languages

In most languages other than English, the symbol was virtually unknown before e-mail became widespread in the mid-1990s. 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 Bulgarian it is called кльомба ("klyomba", means nothing else) or маймунско а ("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 Czech and Slovak it is called zavináč (rolled pickled herring).
• 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").
• 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 arobas or a commercial, and sometimes escargot ("snail"). Other names include queue de singe (monkey-tail), a dans le rond (a in the circle) and arobase from the Spanish which is derived from Arabic, ar-roub.
• In German it is Klammeraffe, meaning "spider monkey", or kaufmännisches A, meaning "commercial A".
• In Greek most often it is called papaki (παπάκι), meaning "little duck".
• In Hebrew it is colloquially known as strudel (שטרודל). The normative term, invented by the Academy of the Hebrew Language, is kruhit (כרוכית), which is a Hebrew word for strudel.
• In Hungarian it is officially called kukac ("worm, mite, or maggot").
• In Icelandic it is called "the earmuff."
• In Indonesian it is monyet A, meaning "monkey A".
• In Italian it is chiocciola ("snail"), sometimes at or ad (pronounced more often /ɛt/, and rarely /at/, instead of /æt/).
• In Japanese it is called attomāku (アットマーク, "at mark"). The word is a wasei-eigo, or Japanese vocabulary forged from the English language.
• In Korean it is golbaeng-i (골뱅이), a dialectal form of daseulgi (다슬기), a small freshwater snail with no tentacles.
• In Latvian it is et. Pronunciation is [æt] or [et].
• In Lithuanian it is eta (equivalent to English at but with Lithuanian ending)
• In Morse Code it is known as a "commat," consisting of the Morse code for the "A" and "C" run together as one character: (dot-dash-dash-dot-dash-dot). 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 Polish it is officially called atka, but commonly małpa (monkey) or małpka (little monkey).
• In Romanian it is Coadă de maimuţă (monkey-tail) or "a-rond"
• In Russian sobaka (собака) (dog) or sometimes sobachka (собачка) (doggy)
• In Serbian it is called лудо А (crazy A) or мајмун (monkey)
• In Slovenian it is called afna (little monkey)
• In Spanish it is called "arroba." The symbol is used to indicate a unit of weight with the same name ( 1 arroba = 25 U. S. pounds). Like many Spanish terms, this one comes originally from Arabic. It also known as caracol ("snail").
• 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")
• 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 Vietnamese it is called a còng (bent a) in the North and a móc (hooked a) in the South.

References

This article is based on material taken from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing prior to 1 November 2008 and incorporated under the "relicensing" terms of the GFDL, version 1.3 or later.

External links

• 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