At sign


at sign, , is normally read aloud as "at"; it is also commonly called the at symbol or commercial at. It is used as an accounting and invoice abbreviation meaning "at a rate of", but it is now seen more widely in email addresses and social media platform handles.
The absence of a single English word for the symbol has prompted some writers to use the French arobase or Spanish and Portuguese arroba, or to coin new words such as ampersat, asperand, and strudel, but none of these has achieved wide use. The term alphasand is sometimes used, especially in East Asia.
Although not included on the keyboard of the earliest commercially successful typewriters, it was on at least one 1889 model and the very successful Underwood models from the "Underwood No. 5" in 1900 onward. It started to be used in email addresses in the 1970s, and is now universally included on computer keyboards.

History

The earliest yet discovered symbol in this shape is found in a Bulgarian translation of a Greek chronicle written by Constantinos Manasses in 1345. Held today in the Vatican Apostolic Library, it features the @ symbol in place of the capital letter alpha "Α" in the word Amen. Why it was used in this context is still a mystery. The evolution of the symbol as used today is not recorded.
Whatever the origin of the @ symbol, the history of its usage is more well-known: it has long been used in Spanish and Portuguese as an abbreviation of arroba, a unit of weight equivalent to 25 pounds, and derived from the Arabic expression of "the quarter". An Italian academic, Giorgio Stabile, claims to have traced the @ symbol to the 16th century, in a mercantile document sent by Florentine Francesco Lapi from Seville to Rome on May 4, 1536. The document is about commerce with Pizarro, in particular the price of an @ of wine in Peru. Currently, the word arroba means both the at-symbol and a unit of weight. In Venetian, the symbol was interpreted to mean amphora, a unit of weight and volume based upon the capacity of the standard amphora jar since the 6th century.
Until now the first historical document containing a symbol resembling a @ as a commercial one is the Spanish "Taula de Ariza", a registry to denote a wheat shipment from Castile to Aragon in 1448; even though the oldest fully developed modern @ sign is the one found on the above-mentioned Florentine letter.

Modern use

Commercial usage

In contemporary English usage, @ is a commercial symbol, meaning at and at the rate of. It has rarely been used in financial ledgers, and is not used in standard typography.

Trademark

In 2012, "@" was registered as a trademark with the German Patent and Trade Mark Office. A cancellation request was filed in 2013, and the cancellation was ultimately confirmed by the German Federal Patent Court in 2017.

Email addresses

A common contemporary use of @ is in email addresses, as in [email protected]. BBN Technologies' Ray Tomlinson is credited with introducing this usage in 1971. This idea of the symbol representing located at in the form user@host is also seen in other tools and protocols; for example, the Unix shell command ssh [email protected] tries to establish an ssh connection to the computer with the hostname example.net using the username jdoe.
On web pages, organizations often obscure email addresses of their members or employees by omitting the @. This practice, known as address munging, makes the email addresses less vulnerable to spam programs that scan the internet for them.

Social media

On some social media platforms and forums, usernames are in the form @johndoe; this type of username is frequently referred to as a "handle".
On online forums without threaded discussions, @ is commonly used to denote a reply; for instance: @Jane to respond to a comment Jane made earlier. Similarly, in some cases, @ is used for "attention" in email messages originally sent to someone else. For example, if an email was sent from Catherine to Steve, but in the body of the email, Catherine wants to make Keirsten aware of something, Catherine will start the line to indicate to Keirsten that the following sentence concerns her. This also helps with mobile email users who cannot see bold or color in email.
In microblogging, @ before the user name is used to send publicly readable replies. The blog and client software can automatically interpret these as links to the user in question. When included as part of a person's or company's contact details, an @ symbol followed by a name is normally understood to refer to a Twitter ID. A similar use of the @ symbol was also made available to Facebook users on September 15, 2009. In Internet Relay Chat, it is shown before users' nicks to denote they have operator status on a channel.

Sports usage

In American English the @ can be used to add information about a sporting event. Where opposing sports teams have their names separated by a "v", the away team can be written first - and the normal "v" replaced with @ to convey at which team's home field the game will be played. This usage is not followed in British English, since conventionally the home team is written first.

Computer languages

@ is used in various programming languages and other computer languages, although there is not a consistent theme to its usage. For example:
In Spanish, where many words end in "-o" when in the masculine gender and end "-a" in the feminine, @ is sometimes used as a gender-neutral substitute for the default "o" ending. For example, the word amigos traditionally represents not only male friends, but also a mixed group, or where the genders are not known. The proponents of gender-inclusive language would replace it with amig@s in these latter two cases, and use amigos only when the group referred to is all-male and amigas only when the group is all female. The Real Academia Española disapproves of this usage.

Other uses and meanings

In some communities, @ is, against current trends, appended to the end of the nick, e.g. deraadt@, to preserve its original meaning − " at ".

Names in other languages

In many languages other than English, although most typewriters included the symbol, the use of @ was less common before email became widespread in the mid-1990s. Consequently, it is often perceived in those languages as denoting "the Internet", computerization, or modernization in general.
  • In Afrikaans, it is called aapstert, meaning 'monkey tail', similarly to the Dutch use of the word.
  • In Arabic, it is آتْ.
  • In Armenian, it is , which means 'puppy'.
  • In Azerbaijani, it is ət which means 'meat', though most likely it is a phonetic transliteration of at.
  • In Basque, it is a bildua.
  • In Belarusian, it is called .
  • In Bosnian, it is ludo a.
  • In Bulgarian, it is called кльомба, маймунско а, маймунка, or баница
  • In Catalan, it is called or ensaïmada.
  • In Chinese:
  • * In mainland China, it used to be called , meaning 'circled A' / 'enclosed A', or , meaning 'lacy A', and sometimes as , meaning 'little mouse'. Nowadays, for most of China's youth, it is called , which is the phonetic transcription from at.
  • * In Taiwan, it is , meaning 'little mouse'.
  • * In Hong Kong and Macau, it is at.
  • In Croatian, it is most often referred to by the English word at, and less commonly and more formally, with the preposition , meaning 'at', 'chez' or 'by'. Informally, it is called a, coming from the local pronunciation of the English word monkey. Note that the Croatian words for monkey,,, jopec, šimija are not used to denote the symbol, except seldom the latter words regionally.
  • In Czech it is called, which means 'rollmops'; the same word is used in Slovak.
  • In Danish, it is . It is not used for prices, where in Danish alone means 'at '.
  • In Dutch, it is called . The a is the first character of the Dutch word which means 'monkey' or 'ape', is the plural of aap. However, the use of the English at has become increasingly popular in Dutch.
  • In Esperanto, it is called , , or .
  • In Estonian, it is called ätt, from the English word at.
  • In Faroese, it is, , tranta, or snápil-a.
  • In Finnish, it was originally called or , but these names are long obsolete and now rarely understood. Nowadays, it is officially, according to the national standardization institute SFS; frequently also spelled at-merkki. Other names include and .
  • In French, it is now officially the , or a commercial. Its origin is the same as that of the Spanish word, which could be derived from the Arabic ar-roub. In France, it is also common to say the English word at when spelling out an email address. In everyday Québec French, one often hears a commercial when sounding out an e-mail address, while TV and radio hosts are more likely to use arobase.
  • In Georgian, it is at, spelled ეთ–ი.
  • In German, it has sometimes been referred to as Klammeraffe or Affenschwanz. Klammeraffe or Affenschwanz refer to the similarity of @ to the tail of a monkey grabbing a branch. More recently, it is commonly referred to as at, as in English.
  • In Greek, it is called meaning 'duckling'.
  • In Greenlandic, an Inuit language, it is called meaning 'A-like' or 'something that looks like A'.
  • In Hebrew, it is colloquially known as , due to the visual resemblance to a cross-section cut of a strudel cake. The normative term, invented by the Academy of the Hebrew Language, is , which is another Hebrew word for 'strudel', but is rarely used.
  • In Hindi, it is at, from the English word.
  • In Hungarian, it is called .
  • In Icelandic, it is referred to as or, which is a direct translation of the English word at.
  • In Indian English, speakers often say at the rate of.
  • In Indonesian, it is usually et. Variations exist – especially if verbal communication is very noisy – such as and , , and .
  • In Irish, it is or .
  • In Italian, it is or, sometimes at or.
  • In Japanese, it is called . The word is wasei-eigo, a loan word from the English language.
  • In Kazakh, it is officially called айқұлақ.
  • In Korean, it is called golbaeng-i, a dialectal form of whelk.
  • In Kurdish, it is ئه ت at, from the English word.
  • In Latvian, it is pronounced the same as in English, but, since in Latvian is written as "e", it is sometimes written as et.
  • In Lithuanian, it is pronounced eta.
  • In Luxembourgish it used to be called Afeschwanz, but due to widespread use, it is now called at, as in English.
  • In Macedonian, it is called .
  • In Malay, it is called alias when it is used in names and when it is used in email addresses, di being the Malay word for 'at'. It is also commonly used to abbreviate which means 'or', 'either'.
  • In Morse code, it is known as a "commat", consisting of the Morse code for the "A" and "C" which run together as one character:. The symbol was added in 2004 for use with email addresses, the only official change to Morse code since World War I.
  • In Nepali, the symbol is called "at the rate." Commonly, people will give their email addresses by including the phrase "at the rate".
  • In Norwegian, it is officially called krøllalfa, and commonly as alfakrøll. Sometimes snabel-a, the Swedish/Danish name, is used. Commonly, people will call the symbol , particularly when giving their email addresses.
  • In Persian, it is at, from the English word.
  • In Polish, it is officially called . Rarely, the English word at is used.
  • In Portuguese, it is called . The word arroba is also used for a weight measure in Portuguese. One arroba is equivalent to 32 old Portuguese pounds, approximately, and both the weight and the symbol are called arroba. In Brazil, cattle are still priced by the arroba – now rounded to. This naming is because the at sign was used to represent this measure.
  • In Romanian, it is most commonly called at, but also colloquially called Soviet computer
  • In Russian, it is commonly called собака.
  • In Serbian, it is called , , or .
  • In Slovak, it is called zavináč.
  • In Slovenian, it is called afna.
  • In Spanish-speaking countries, it denotes a pre-metric unit of weight. While there are regional variations in Spain and Mexico, it is typically considered to represent approximately 25 pounds, and both the weight and the symbol are called arroba.
  • In Sámi, it is called bussáseaibi meaning 'cat's tail'.
  • In Swedish, it is called or simply at, as in the English language. Less formally it is also known as or alfakrull.
  • In Swiss German, it is commonly called Affenschwanz. However, the use of the English word at has become increasingly popular in Swiss German, as with Standard German.
  • In Tagalog, the word means 'and', so the symbol is used like an ampersand in colloquial writing such as text messages.
  • In Thai, it is commonly called at, as in English.
  • In Turkish, it is commonly called et, a variant pronunciation of English at.
  • In Ukrainian, it is commonly called ет or Равлик, which means 'snail'.
  • In Urdu, it is اٹ.
  • In Vietnamese, it is called in the north and in the south.
  • In Welsh, it is sometimes known as a malwen or .

    Unicode

In Unicode, the at sign is encoded as. The named entity @ was introduced in HTML5.

Variants