At sign

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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, the ampersat, the commat, the obelix, or just at. In Israel the At symbol is often referred to as a "strudel," in Dutch, a "apestaart," in italian a "chiocciola." Sometimes it is called a monkey because it looks like a monkey with its tail wrapped around it.It has the official name commercial at in the ANSI/CCITT/Unicode character encoding standards.

[edit] History

It is not known which particular word gave rise to the modern at sign.

Theories include:

• In the Middle Ages, used by monks to shorten the Latin word ad which means "at, toward, or by."
• In the 1400s for the Spanish unit of weight arroba = "jar".
• From the Latin preposition ad, which means about with numerals. However, no document showing this usage has been presented.
• An abbreviation of the Greek preposition ανά (ana), which means 'at the rate of' when used with numerals, exactly its modern commercial usage.
• Giorgio Stabile, a professor of history in Rome, claims to have traced the @ symbol back to the Italian Renaissance in a Venetian mercantile document signed by Francesco Lapi on May 4, 1537. 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.
• 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.

One theory of the evolution of the at sign

• 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notation you will see on English commercial vouchers and ledgers all the way into the 1990s, where the usage was superseded for accountants with its email usage.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. 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 @ 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.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] 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.^[1]

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 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 as a prefix, with various meanings:

• Perl: @ prefixes variables which contain arrays, as opposed to scalar values (indicated with '$') and hash tables / associative arrays ('%').
• PHP: just before a function to make the interpreter suppress errors that would be generated when using that function.
• Python: @ denotes a decorator as described in PEP 318.
• Ruby: @ prefixes instance variables, and @@ prefixes a class variable.
• Objective-C: Denotes compiler directives and string constants.
• XPath: @ prefixes XML Attribute tests.
• IRC protocol: @ 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.
• C#: @ is the literal string operator meaning that the string should be used "as is" and not be processed for escape sequences.
• Java: Used to denote annotations (sometimes called metadata) since version 5.0.

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.

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 roguelike games 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.

[edit] "Commercial at" in other languages

In most languages other than English, @ 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 Belarusian it's called "слімак" ("helix")
• 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 called majmun (monkey)
• 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").
• 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 arrobe or a commercial, 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 is often referred to as Klammeraffe(meaning "spider monkey"). Klammeraffe refers to the similarity of the @ to the hand of a monkey grabbing a branch. Lately, it is often called at just like in English
• In Greek, it is most often referred to as papaki (παπάκι), meaning "little duck".
• In Greenlandic Inuit language - it is called aajusaq meaning "a-like" or "something that looks like a"
• 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 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 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. It is sometimes called naruto, because of Naruto whirlpool or food (kamaboko).
• In Korean it is golbaeng-i (골뱅이), 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 somtimes written as 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: (.--.-.). 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).
• 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 (ludo A crazy A) or мајмун (majmun 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).
• 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 kanelbulle (cinnamon bun)
• 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), slymachok (слимачок) (snail) 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).

[edit] Variants

IBM's e-business logo uses small letter e at the centre, while Hilary Duff's own 'Stuff by Hilary Duff' logo uses small letter u.

Pat Mastelotto, drummer for the band King Crimson, has been known to jokingly write or illustrate his name as "P@".

[edit] References

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.

[edit] External links

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

• 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