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The typographic character @, the at sign, denotes a pan-lingual abbreviation of the word 'at'. It began use as the shorthand for the phrase "at the rate of" in accounting and commercial invoices, e.g. “7 widgets @ $2 ea. = $14”. Nowadays, this commercial character is ubiquitous because it appears in all e-mail addresses. In English, it is informally pronounced as at, and can be referred to as the at sign, the asperand^[1] or the at symbol. Its official, typographic character nomenclature is commercial at in the ANSI/CCITT/Unicode character encoding standards. Some historical names are mentioned in the "History" section below. It has been suggested that Accounting scholarship be merged into this article or section. ... An invoice or bill is a commercial document issued by a seller to a buyer, indicating the products, quantities and agreed prices for products or services with which the seller has already provided the buyer. ... A widget is a placeholder name for an object or, more specifically, a mechanical or other manufactured device. ... -1... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... The American National Standards Institute or ANSI (pronounced an-see) is a nonprofit organization that oversees the development of standards for products, services, processes and systems in the United States. ... ITU-T is the telecom standardization organization of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). ... The Unicode Standard, Version 5. ...

History

Evidence of the usage of @ to signify French "à" (meaning "at") from a 1674 protocol from a Swedish lower court and magistrate (Arboga rådhusrätt och magistrat)

These are some theories about the origin of the commercial at character in modern usage: Events February 19 - England and the Netherlands sign the Treaty of Westminster. ... The phrase lower court has several possible meanings in English: In reference to an appeal, the lower court is the court whose decision is being reviewed. ... A magistrate is a judicial officer. ... Arboga is a Municipality in Västmanland County, in central Sweden. ...

• Medieval monks abbreviated the Latin word ad (at, toward, by, about) next to a numeral.
• It was a 15th-century Spanish unit of weight: arroba = jar.
• The abbreviated Greek preposition ανά, ana, meaning at the rate of, its commercial usage.
• An Italian academic claims to have traced the @ symbol to the Italian Renaissance, in a Venetian mercantile document signed by Francesco Lapi on May 4, 1537.^[2] The document is about commerce with Pizarro, in particular the price of an @ of wine in Peru; @ meant amphora (Italian anfora; Spanish and Portuguese arroba). Currently, the word arroba means the at-symbol and a unit of weight (cf. below). In this usage, the symbol represents one amphora, a unit of weight and volume based upon the capacity of the standard terracotta jar, and entered modern meaning and use as "at the rate of" in northern Europe.
• From Norman French "à" meaning "at" in the "each" sense, i.e. "2 widgets à £5.50 = £11.00" is the accountancy shorthand notation in English commercial vouchers and ledgers to the 1990s, when the e-mail usage superseded the accountancy usage. It also is so used in Modern French and Swedish; in this view, the at-symbol is a stylised form of à that avoids raising the writing hand from the page in drawing the symbol; this compromise between @ and à in French handwriting is in street market signs.
• It could be the abbreviation of any word beginning in a.

The @ was present in the 1902 model Lambert typewriter made by Lambert Typewriter Company of New York. Its inclusion in the original 1963 ASCII character set went unremarked as it was a standard commercial typewriter character, e.g. the 1961 IBM Selectric typewriter's keyboard included the @ (at-symbol). A numeral is a symbol or group of symbols that represents a number. ... Jar can mean: Containers: Antique fruit jar Canopic jar, used in ancient Egyptian burial Leyden jar, a simple capacitor Killing jar [municipality in Zaqatalskiy region of Azerbaijan] JAR (file format) is a file format used to package Java programming language applications Jar, Norway, a centre in the municipality of B... Academia is a collective term for the scientific and cultural community engaged in higher education and research, taken as a whole. ... The Italian Renaissance began the opening phase of the Renaissance, a period of great cultural change and achievement in Europe that spanned the period from the end of the 14th century to about 1600, marking the transition between Medieval and Early Modern Europe. ... is the 124th day of the year (125th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Events January 6 - Alessandro de Medici assassinated August 25 - The Honourable Artillery Company, the oldest surviving regiment in the British Army, and the second most senior, was formed. ... Francisco Pizarro ( 1475–June 26, 1541) was a Spanish conquistador, conqueror of the Inca Empire and founder of the city of Lima. ... Amphoræ on display in Bodrum Castle, Turkey An amphora is a type of ceramic vase with two handles, used for the transportation and storage of perishable goods and more rarely as containers for the ashes of the dead or as prize awards. ... Terra cotta is a hard semifired waterproof ceramic clay used in pottery and building construction. ... A widget is a placeholder name for an object or, more specifically, a mechanical or other manufactured device. ... Accountancy (profession)[1] or accounting (methodology) is the measurement, statement or provision of assurance about financial information primarily used by managers, investors, tax authorities and other decision makers to make resource allocation decisions within companies, organizations, and public agencies. ... The English are an ethnic group originating in the lowlands of Great Britain and are descendent primarily from the Anglo-Saxons, the Celts with minor influences from the Scandanavians and other groups. ... A voucher is a certificate which is worth a certain monetary value and which may only be spent for specific reasons or on specific goods. ... A ledger (from the English dialect forms liggen or leggen, to lie or lay; in sense adapted from the Dutch substantive logger), is the principal book for recording transactions. ... IBM Selectric The IBM Selectric typewriter (occasionally known as the IBM Golfball typewriter) is an influential electric typewriter design. ...

Modern uses

A theoretical evolution of the at-sign

In contemporary English usage, @ is a commercial symbol, meaning at and at the rate of. It has been used, rarely, in financial documents or grocers' price tags, and is not used in standard typography.^[3] Image File history File links At-sign_evolution. ... Image File history File links At-sign_evolution. ... A specimen of roman typefaces by William Caslon Typography is the art and techniques of type design, modifying type glyphs, and arranging type. ...

Its most familiar contemporary use is in e-mail addresses (transmitted by SMTP), as in jdoe@example.com (the user jdoe working at the computer named example in the domain com). Ray Tomlinson is credited with introducing this usage in 1971.^[4] This idea of the symbol representing located at in the form "user@host" also is seen in other tools and protocols: 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. An e-mail address identifies a location to which e-mail messages can be delivered. ... Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is the de facto standard for e-mail transmissions across the Internet. ... you mom(born 1941) is a programmer who implemented an email system in 1971. ... SSH redirects here. ... A hostname (occasionally also, a sitename) is the unique name by which a network attached device (which could consist of a computer, file server, network storage device, fax machine, copier, cable modem, etc. ...

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 Python 2.4 and up, it is used to decorate a function (wrap the function in another one at creation time); in Java, it is used to denote annotations, a kind of metadata, since version 5.0; in Ruby, @ prefixes instance variables, and @@ prefixes class variables. A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer. ... For other uses, see Perl (disambiguation). ... In computer science and mathematics, a variable (pronounced ) (sometimes called an object or identifier in computer science) is a symbolic representation used to denote a quantity or expression. ... For the microarray in genetics, see SNP array. ... For other uses, see PHP (disambiguation). ... In computer science, a subroutine (function, method, procedure, or subprogram) is a portion of code within a larger program, which performs a specific task and can be relatively independent of the remaining code. ... In computer science, an interpreter is a computer program that executes, or performs, instructions written in a computer programming language. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... In various branches of mathematics and computer science, strings are sequences of various simple objects (symbols, tokens, characters, etc. ... Programming languages generally have a set of operators that are similar to operators in mathematics: they are somehow special functions. ... Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language. ... Java language redirects here. ... Ruby is a reflective, dynamic, object-oriented programming language. ... In object-oriented programming, an instance variable or data member is the data encapsulated within a class or object. ... In computer science and mathematics, a variable is a symbol denoting a quantity or symbolic representation. ...

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 formal logic, a modal logic is any logic for handling modalities: concepts like possibility, existence, and necessity. ... Possible Worlds is: Possible Worlds (play) a play by John Mighton Possible Worlds (poetry book) a book of poems by Peter Porter (poet) Possible Worlds (book) a book by J. B. S. Haldane This is a disambiguation page: a list of articles associated with the same title. ...

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 sex groups and in cases where the sex is unknown. For example, the Portuguese/Spanish word "amigos" (friends), which can mean men and women friends or all men friends would be replaced with "amig@s". The character is intended to resemble a digraph of both the masculine letter "o" and the feminine letter "a". The usefulness of this is debatable; in Portuguese/Spanish, the masculine grammatical gender may include both men and women, while the feminine gender is exclusively for and about women; there is no neuter gender for most nouns. Some advocates of gender-neutral language-modification feel that using the male grammatical gender as a generic gender designator indicates implicit linguistic disregard for women. Many Portuguese/Spanish speakers think that this usage of the @ (at-sign) degrades Portuguese/Spanish; some argue it is just more cultural imperialism; generally, this construction is used only in personal, informal writing, and has no established pronunciation. Alternative forms would be amigos/as and amigⒶs using the circle-A of anarchism as the bisexual digraph. The orthodox spellings of common words are often altered to make a political point, particularly in informal writing on the Internet, but also in some serious political writing that opposes the status quo. ... The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family that comprises all the languages that descend from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. ... Non-sexist language (gender-generic, gender-inclusive, gender-neutral, or sex-neutral language) is language that attempts to refer neither to males nor females when discussing an abstract or hypothetical person whose sex cannot otherwise be determined, as opposed to sexist language, which attempts to refer to males. ... Gender-neutral language (gender-generic, gender-inclusive, non-sexist, or sex-neutral language) is language that attempts to refer neither to males nor females when discussing an abstract or hypothetical person whose sex cannot otherwise be determined. ... Cultural imperialism is the practice of promoting, distinguishing, separating, artificially injecting of the culture or language of one nation in another. ... This article discusses various anarchist symbols, including the circle-A and the black flag. ...

In most roguelike games (Angband and NetHack), @ denotes the player character. Some roguelikes also use @ to denote any human being. This usage is because the @ resembles an overhead view of a person's head and shoulders. A roguelike is a computer game that borrows some of the elements of the 1980s computer game Rogue. ... Angband is a dungeon-crawling roguelike computer game derived from Umoria (a C/Unix port of Moria). ... This article is about the role-playing game. ...

The @ is also used sometimes (e.g. articles about missing persons, obituaries, 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. The IPA symbol for the Schwa In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa can mean: An unstressed and toneless neutral vowel sound in any language, often but not necessarily a mid-central vowel. ... Articles with similar titles include the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ... Kirshenbaum, sometimes called ASCII-IPA, is a system used to represent the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in ASCII. It was developed for Usenet, notably the newsgroups sci. ... Articles with similar titles include the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ...

On some online forums without proper Threaded discussions, @ is used to denote a reply, for instance: "@Jane" to respond to a comment Jane made earlier. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

In online discourse, the @ is used by some anarchists as a substitute for the traditional circle-A . Anarchist redirects here. ... This article discusses various anarchist symbols, including the circle-A and the black flag. ...

It is frequently used in Leet as a substitute for the letter A. This article does not adequately cite its references or sources. ...

In Malagasy, @ is an informal abbreviation for the prepositional form 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. Mechanical desktop typewriters, such as this Underwood Five, were long time standards of government agencies, newsrooms, and sales offices. ...

• In Azeri it is at (using the English pronunciation).
• 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.
• In Chinese
  • In mainland China it is quan a (圈a), meaning "circled 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 the English word, monkey. The Croatian word for monkey, majmun, is not used to denote the at sign.
• 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 should normally only be used when quoting prices; it should always be called arobase or, better yet, arobas when in an e-mail address), and sometimes a dans le rond (a in the circle). Same origin as Spanish which could be derived from Arabic, ar-roub. Southern French speakers refer to it as le petit escargot ("little snail") due to its appearance, or le a avec le queue du marsupilami, in refers to a comic.
• 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") or a commerciale, 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 Macedonian it is called мајмунче (pronun. my-moon-cheh, little monkey)
• 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. Sometimes Snabel a(trunk a, as in elephant's trunk) is used. )
• In Persian it is at (using the English pronunciation).
• In Portuguese, it is called 'arroba'. (Some say that in Portugal it is called 'caracol' (snail) although this is yet to be confirmed). The word arroba is also used for a weight measure in Portuguese. While there are regional variations, one arroba is typically considered as representing approximately 25 pounds, 11.5 kg, and both the weight and the symbol are called arroba. In Brazil, cattle are still priced by the arroba — now rounded to 15 kg.
• In Polish it is called, both officially and commonly małpa (monkey); sometimes also małpka (little monkey) or bałwanek (little snowman).
• In Romanian it is Coadă de maimuţă (monkey-tail) or "a-rond"
• In Russian it is most commonly 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 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 (11.5 kg), and both the weight and the symbol are called arroba. It has also been used as a unit of volume for wine and oil.
• In Swedish it is called snabel-a ("(elephant's) trunk-a"), kanelbulle (cinnamon bun) or simply "at" like in the English language.
• In Swiss German it is commonly called Affeschwanz ("monkey-tail").
• In Tagalog it is commonly called utong ("nipple").
• 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).

The Azerbaijani language, also called Azeri, Azari, Azeri Turkish, or Azerbaijani Turkish, is the official language of the Republic of Azerbaijan. ... Basque (native name: euskara) is the language spoken by the Basque people who inhabit the Pyrenees in North-Central Spain and the adjoining region of South-Western France. ... Catalan IPA: (català IPA: or []) is a Romance language, the national language of Andorra, and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Balearic Islands, Catalonia and Valencia, and in the city of LAlguer in the Italian island of Sardinia. ... ... This article is about the rodent. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Herring. ... Approximate worldwide distribution of monkeys. ... A scorpion tail The tail is the section at the rear end of an animals body; in general, the term refers to a distinct, flexible appendage to the torso. ... This article is about the language. ... Arabic redirects here. ... Type species Simia paniscus Linnaeus, 1758 Species Ateles paniscus Ateles belzebuth Ateles chamek Ateles hybridus Ateles marginatus Ateles fusciceps Ateles geoffroyi Spider monkeys are New World monkeys of the family Atelidae, subfamily Atelinae. ... The Kalaallisut language is an Eskimo-Aleut language spoken in Greenland and closely related to Canadian languages like Inuktitut. ... Hebrew redirects here. ... Apfelstrudel A strudel is a type of pastry that originated in Germany and Austria and is most often associated with Austrian and German cuisine. ... The Academy of the Hebrew Language (האקדמיה ללשון העברית) is the Supreme Foundation for the Science of the Hebrew Language, that was founded by the Israeli Government in 1953. ... This article is about the shape and mathematical concept of circle. ... For other uses, see Snail (disambiguation). ... Wasei-eigo (和製英語 wasei eigo, lit. ... Gairaigo (外来語) is Japanese for loan word or borrowed word, and indicates a transliteration (or transvocalization) into Japanese. ... Naruto is a Japanese word that can refer to things with spiral imagery (cf. ... Naruto strait, view from Awaji, with flow from the right This Hiroshige ukiyo-e shows the Naruto whirlpool. ... Bold textMason Struthers (Japanese Kanji: ?) is a variety of Japanese processed seafood products, called surimi, in which various white fish are pureed, formed into distinctive loaves, and then steamed until fully cooked and firm in texture. ... Luxembourgish (Luxembourgish: , French: , German: , Walloon: ), also spelled Luxemburgish, is a West Germanic language spoken in Luxembourg. ... 1922 Chart of the Morse Code Letters and Numerals Morse code is a method for transmitting telegraphic information, using standardized sequences of short and long elements to represent the letters, numerals, punctuation and special characters of a message. ... Alpha (uppercase Α, lowercase α) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. ... Farsi redirects here. ... Officially the pound is the name for at least three different units of mass: The pound (avoirdupois). ... For general information about the genus, including other species of cattle, see Bos. ... Kg redirects here. ... Serbian (; ) is one of the standard versions of the Shtokavian dialect, used primarily in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, and by Serbs in the Serbian diaspora. ... Slovenian or Slovene (slovenski jezik or slovenščina) is an Indo-European language that belongs to the family of South Slavic languages. ... Officially the pound is the name for at least three different units of mass: The pound (avoirdupois). ... Swiss German (Schweizerdeutsch, Schwyzerdütsch, Schwiizertüütsch, Schwizertitsch) is any of the Alemannic dialects spoken in Switzerland. ... Tagalog (pronunciation: ) is one of the major languages of the Republic of the Philippines. ... Welsh redirects here, and this article describes the Welsh language. ...

References

Bringhurst lives in Vancouver. ... Robert Bringhurst authored three editions of a book entitled The Elements of Typographic Style. ...

External links

Look up @, at sign in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

At sign

• 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
• UK Telegraph Article: Chinese parents choose to name their baby "@"