at sign

The at sign () is an accounting and invoice abbreviation meaning "at a rate of" (e.g. 7 widgets @ £2 per widget = £14), now seen more widely in email addresses and social media platform handles. It is normally read aloud as "at" and is also commonly called the at symbol, commercial at, or address sign. Most languages have their own name for the symbol.

Although not included on the keyboard layout of the earliest commercially successful typewriters, it was on at least one 1889 model"The @-symbol, part 2 of 2"
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Shady Characters ⌂ The secret life of punctuation
'' 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 routinely included on most types of 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" as an initial in the word Amen; however, the reason behind it being used in this context is still unknown. The evolution of the symbol as used today is not recorded.

It has long been used in Catalan, 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" ( pronounced ''ar-rubʿ''). A symbol resembling an @ is found in the Spanish "Taula de Ariza", a registry to denote a wheat shipment from Castile to Aragon, in 1448. The historian 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. It could also mean “adi” (standard Italian “addì”, i. e. ‘on the day of’) as used on a health pass in Northern Italy in 1667.

Name

The name of the symbol arises from its original use in showing quantities and their price per unit for example, "10 widgets @ £1.50 each". The precise origin of the symbol is uncertain.

The absence of a single English word for the symbol has prompted some writers to use the French ''arobase'', to coin new words such as ''ampersat'' and ''asperand'', or the (visual) onomatopoeia ''strudel'', but none of these have achieved wide use.

Modern use

Commercial usage

In contemporary English usage, @ is a commercial symbol, meaning ''at'' and ''at the rate of'' or ''at the price 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 (using the SMTP system), as in [email protected] (the user jdoe located ''at'' the domain example.com). Ray Tomlinson of BBN Technologies is credited for having introduced 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 the email addresses of their members or employees by omitting the @. This practice, known as address munging, attempts to make the email addresses less vulnerable to spam programs that scan the internet for them.

Social media

On many social media platforms and forums, usernames or handles prefixed with an @ (in the form @johndoe) are interpreted as mentions of that user and may be treated specially.

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 signal to Keirsten that the following sentence concerns her. This also helps with mobile email users who might not see bold or color in email.

In microblogging (such as on Twitter, GNU social- and ActivityPub-based microblogs), an @ before the user name is used to send publicly readable replies (e.g. @otheruser: Message text here). The blog and client system 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 handle. A similar use of the @ symbol was added to Facebook on September 15, 2009. In Internet Relay Chat (IRC), it is shown before users' nicknames 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" (for versus), 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 ActionScript, @ is used in XML parsing and traversal as a string prefix to identify attributes in contrast to child elements.
* In Ada 2022, @ is the ''target name'' symbol, an abbreviation of the LHS of an assignment; it is used to avoid repetition of potentially long names in assignment statements. For example: A_Very_Long_Variable_Name := A_Very_Long_Variable_Name + 1; is shortened to A_Very_Long_Variable_Name := @ + 1;, increasing readability.
* In ALGOL 68, the @ symbol is ''brief form'' of the at keyword; it is used to change the lower bound of an array. For example: refers to an array starting at index 88.
* In Dyalog APL, @ is used as a functional way to modify or replace data at specific locations in an array.
* In the ASP.NET MVC Razor template markup syntax, the @ character denotes the start of code statement blocks or the start of text content.
* In Assembly language, @ is sometimes used as a dereference operator.
* In CSS, @ is used in special statements outside of a CSS block.
* In C#, it denotes "verbatim strings", where no characters are escaped and two double-quote characters represent a single double-quote. As a prefix it also allows keywords to be used as identifiers, a form of stropping.
* In D, it denotes function attributes: like: @safe, @nogc, user defined @('from_user') which can be evaluated at compile time (with __traits) or @property to declare properties, which are functions that can be syntactically treated as if they were fields or variables.
* In DIGITAL Command Language, the @ character was the command used to execute a command procedure. To run the command procedure VMSINSTAL.COM, one would type @VMSINSTAL at the command prompt.
* In the Domain Name System (DNS), @ is used to represent the , typically the "root" of the domain without a prefixed sub-domain. (Ex: wikipedia.org vs. www.wikipedia.org)
* In Forth, it is used to fetch values from the address on the top of the stack. The operator is pronounced as "fetch".
* In Haskell, it is used in so-called ''as-patterns''. This notation can be used to give aliases to patterns, making them more readable.
* in HTML, it can be encoded as @
* In J, denotes function composition.
* In Java, it has been used to denote annotations, a kind of metadata, since version 5.0.
* In Julia, it denotes the invocation of a macro.
* In LiveCode, it is prefixed to a parameter to indicate that the parameter is passed by reference.
* In an LXDE autostart file (as used, for example, on the Raspberry Pi computer), @ is prefixed to a command to indicate that the command should be automatically re-executed if it crashes.
* In a Makefile, @ specifies to not output the command before it is executed.
* In ML, it denotes list concatenation.
* 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").
* In Objective-C, @ is prefixed to language-specific keywords such as @implementation and to form string literals.
* In InterSystems ObjectScript, @ is the indirection operator, enabling dynamic runtime substitution of part or all of a command line, a command, or a command argument.
* In Pascal, @ is the "address of" operator (it tells the location at which a variable is found).
* In Perl, @ prefixes variables which contain arrays , including array slices and hash slices or . This use is known as a '' sigil''.
* In PHP, it is used just before an expression to make the interpreter suppress errors that would be generated from that expression.
* In Python 2.4 and up, it is used to decorate a function (wrap the function in another one at creation time). In Python 3.5 and up, it is also used as an overloadable matrix multiplication operator.
*In R and S-PLUS, it is used to extract slots from S4 objects.
*In Razor, it is used for C# code blocks.
* In Ruby, it functions as a sigil: @ prefixes instance variables, and @@ prefixes class variables.
* In Rust, it is used to bind values matched by a pattern to a variable.
* In Scala, it is used to denote annotations (as in Java), and also to bind names to subpatterns in pattern-matching expressions.
* In Swift, @ prefixes "annotations" that can be applied to classes or members. Annotations tell the compiler to apply special semantics to the declaration like keywords, without adding keywords to the language.
* In T-SQL, @ prefixes variables and @@ prefixes "niladic" system functions.
* In several xBase-type programming languages, like DBASE, FoxPro/Visual FoxPro and Clipper, it is used to denote position on the screen. For example: to show the word "HELLO" in line 1, column 1.
** In FoxPro/Visual FoxPro, it is also used to indicate explicit pass by reference of variables when calling procedures or functions (but it is not an address operator).
* In a Windows Batch file, an @ at the start of a line suppresses the echoing of that command. In other words, is the same as ECHO OFF applied to the current line only. Normally a Windows command is executed and takes effect from the next line onward, but @ is a rare example of a command that takes effect immediately. It is most commonly used in the form which not only switches off echoing but prevents the command line itself from being echoed.
* In Windows PowerShell, @ is used as array operator for array and hash table literals and for enclosing here-string literals.

Gender neutrality in Spanish

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 (especially English) scientific and technical literature, @ is used to describe the conditions under which data are valid or a measurement has been made. E.g. the density of saltwater may read ''d'' = 1.050 g/cm³ @ 15 °C (read "at" for @), density of a gas ''d'' = 0.150 g/L @ 20 °C, 1 bar, or noise of a car 81 dB @ 80 km/h (speed).
*In philosophical logic, '@' is used to denote the actual world (in contrast to non-actual possible worlds). Analogously, a 'designated' world in a Kripke model may be labelled '@'.
* In chemical formulae, @ is used to denote trapped atoms or molecules. For instance, La@C₆₀ means lanthanum inside a fullerene cage. See article Endohedral fullerene for details.
* In Malagasy, @ is an informal abbreviation for the prepositional form ''amin'ny''.
* In Malay, @ is an informal abbreviation for the word "atau", meaning "or" in English.
* In genetics, @ is the abbreviation for locus, as in IGL@ for ''immunoglobulin lambda locus''.
* In the Koalib language of Sudan, @ is used as a letter in Arabic loanwords. The Unicode Consortium rejected a proposal to encode it separately as a letter in Unicode. SIL International uses Private Use Area code points U+F247 and U+F248 for lowercase and capital versions, although they have marked this PUA representation as deprecated since September 2014.Constable, Peter, and Lorna A. Priest (January 17, 2019
''SIL Corporate PUA Assignments 5.2a''

SIL International
. pp. 59–60. Retrieved on July 20, 2020.
* A schwa, as the actual schwa character "ə" may be difficult to produce on many computers. It is used in this capacity in some ASCII IPA schemes, including SAMPA and X-SAMPA.
* In leet it may substitute for the letter "A".
* It is frequently used in typing and text messaging as an abbreviation for "at".
* In Portugal it may be used in typing and text messaging with the meaning "french kiss" (''linguado'').
* In online discourse, @ is used by some anarchists as a substitute for the traditional circle-A.
* Algebraic notation for the Crazyhouse chess variant: An @ between a piece and a square denotes a piece dropped onto that square from the player's reserve.
* In many roguelike games, @ is used to represent the player character.
* In Spain and Portugal, the ''Arroba'', abbreviated using the @ sign, is a customary unit of weight, mass or volume. The name ''arroba'' is used in both countries for the @ sign more generally.

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. Naming the symbol after animals is also common.
* In Afrikaans, it is called , meaning 'monkey tail', similarly to the Dutch use of the word ( is the word for 'monkey' or 'ape' in Dutch, comes from the Dutch ).
* In Arabic, it is ().
* In Armenian, it is (), which means 'puppy'.
* In Azerbaijani, it is () which means 'meat', though most likely it is a phonetic transliteration of ''at''.
* In Basque, it is ('wrapped A').
* In Belarusian, it is called (, meaning 'helix' or 'snail').
* In Bosnian, it is ('crazy A').
* In Bulgarian, it is called ( – 'a badly written letter'), ( – 'monkey A'), ( – 'little monkey'), or ( – a pastry roll often made in a shape similar to the character)
* In Catalan, it is called (a unit of measure) or (a Mallorcan pastry, because of the similar shape of this food).
* In Chinese:
** In mainland China, it used to be called (pronounced ), meaning 'circled A' / ' enclosed A', or (pronounced ), meaning 'lacy A', and sometimes as (pronounced ), meaning 'little mouse'. Nowadays, for most of China's youth, it is called (pronounced ), which is a phonetic transcription of ''at''.
** In Taiwan, it is (pronounced ), meaning 'little mouse'.
** In Hong Kong and Macau, it is ''at''.
* In Croatian, it is most often referred to by the English word ''at'' (pronounced ''et''), and less commonly and more formally, with the preposition (with the addressee in the nominative case, not locative as per usual rection of ), meaning 'at', '' or 'by'. Informally, it is called a , coming from the local pronunciation of the English word ''monkey''. Note that the Croatian words for monkey, , , , 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 ('elephant's trunk A'). It is not used for prices, where in Danish means 'at (per piece)'.
* In Dutch, it is called ('monkey's tail'). The ''a'' is the first character of the Dutch word which means 'monkey' or 'ape'; is the plural of . However, the use of the English ''at'' has become increasingly popular in Dutch.
* In Esperanto, it is called ('at' – for the email use, with an address like "[email protected]" pronounced ), ('each' – refers only to the mathematical use), or (meaning 'snail').
* In Estonian, it is called , from the English word ''at''.
* In Faroese, it is , ('at'), , or (' lephant'strunk A').
* In Finnish, it was originally called ("fee sign") or ("unit price sign"), but these names are long obsolete and now rarely understood. Nowadays, it is officially , according to the national standardization institute SFS; frequently also spelled . Other names include ('cat's tail') and ('miaow-meow') or short; “miu-mau”.
* In French, it is now officially the (also spelled or ), or (though this is most commonly used in French-speaking Canada, and should normally only be used when quoting prices; it should always be called or, better yet, when in an email address). Its origin is the same as that of the Spanish word, which could be derived from the Arabic (). In France, it is also common (especially for younger generations) to say the English word ''at'' when spelling out an email address. In everyday Québec French, one often hears when sounding out an e-mail address, while TV and radio hosts are more likely to use .
* In Georgian, it is , spelled (, ).
* In German, it has sometimes been referred to as (meaning 'spider monkey') or (meaning 'monkey tail'). or refer to the similarity of @ to the tail of a monkey. More recently, it is commonly referred to as , 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 , from the English word.
* In Hungarian, it is called (a playful synonym for 'worm' or 'maggot').
* In Icelandic, it is referred to as ("the at sign") or , which is a direct translation of the English word ''at''.
* In Indian English, speakers often say ''at the rate of'' (with e-mail addresses quoted as "example ''at the rate of'' example.com").
* In Indonesian, it is usually . Variations exist – especially if verbal communication is very noisy – such as and (both meaning 'circled A'), ('snail A'), and (most rarely) ('monkey A').
* In Irish, it is (meaning 'at') or (meaning 'at sign').
* In Italian, it is ('snail') or , sometimes (pronounced more often and rarely ) or .
* In Japanese, it is called (, from the English words ''at mark''). The word is , a loan word from the English language.
* In Kazakh, it is officially called (, 'earlobe').
* In Korean, it is called (, meaning 'whelk'), a dialectal form of whelk.
* In Kurdish, it is or (Latin Hawar script), (Perso-Arabic Sorani script) coming from the English word ''at''.
* In Latvian, it is pronounced the same as in English, but, since in Latvian is written as "e" (not "a" as in English), it is sometimes written as .
* In Lithuanian, it is pronounced (equivalent to the English ''at'').
* In Luxembourgish it used to be called ('monkey tail'), but due to widespread use, it is now called , as in English.
* In Macedonian, it is called (, , 'little monkey').
* In Malaysia, it is called when it is used in names and when it is used in email addresses, 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 ('curly alpha' or 'alpha twirl'), and commonly as . Sometimes , the Swedish/Danish name (which means 'trunk A', as in 'elephant's trunk'), is used. Commonly, people will call the symbol (as in English), particularly when giving their email addresses. The computer manufacturer Norsk Data used it as the command prompt, and it was often called "grisehale" (pig's tail).
* In Persian, it is , , from the English word.
* In Polish, it is commonly called ('monkey'). Rarely, the English word ''at'' is used.
* In Portuguese, it is called (from the Arabic , ). The word 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 . In Brazil, cattle are still priced by the  – now rounded to . This naming is because the at sign was used to represent this measure.
* In Romanian, it is most commonly called , but also colloquially called ("monkey tail") or . The latter is commonly used, and it comes from the word ''round'' (from its shape), but that is nothing like the mathematical symbol (rounded A). Others call it , or (Romanian word for 'at').

* In Russian, it is commonly called ( – ' ittledog').
* In Serbian, it is called ( – 'crazy A'), ( – 'little monkey'), or ( – 'monkey').
* In Slovak, it is called ('rollmop', a pickled fish roll, as in Czech).
* In Slovenian, it is called (an informal word for 'monkey').
* In Spanish-speaking countries, it is called (from the Arabic , which denotes a pre-metric unit of weight).
* In Sámi ( North Sámi), it is called meaning 'cat's tail'.
* In Swedish, it is called ('elephant's trunk A') or simply , as in the English language. Less formally it is also known as ('cinnamon roll') or ('alpha curl').
* In Swiss German, it is commonly called ('monkey-tail'). However, the use of the English word 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 (e.g. , 'cook and eat').
* In Thai, it is commonly called , as in English.
* In Turkish, it is commonly called , a variant pronunciation of English ''at''.
* In Ukrainian, it is commonly called ( – 'at') or Равлик (ravlyk), which means 'snail'.
* In Urdu, it is ().
* In Uzbek, it is commonly called ('little dog').
* In Vietnamese, it is called ('bent A') in the north and ('hooked A') in the south.
* In Welsh, it is sometimes known as a or (both meaning "snail").

Unicode

*
*
*

See also

* ASCII
* Circle-A a symbol of Anarchism
* Enclosed A (, )

Notes

References

External links

*

"The Accidental History of the @ Symbol "
''Smithsonian magazine'', September 2012, Retrieved October 2021.
* The @-symbol
part 1intermissionpart 2addenda

Shady Characters ⌂ The secret life of punctuation
' August 2011, Retrieved June 2013.


''London Review of Books'', Vol. 31 No. 10, 28 May 2009, Retrieved June 2013.

ascii64 – the @ book – free download (creative commons) – by patrik sneyd – foreword by luigi colani)
November 2006, Retrieved June 2013.


The many names of the at sign in various languages, 1997, Retrieved June 2013.

Sum: the @ Symbol
''LINGUIST List 7.968'' July 1996, Retrieved June 2013.



World Wide Words
' August 1996, Retrieved June 2013.

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Latin-script ligatures
Typographical symbols
Graphemes
Punctuation