At sign

"@" and ":@" redirect here. For the emoticon, see List of emoticons. For the letter A within a circle, see Enclosed A. For the album by John Zorn and Thurston Moore, see "@" (album).

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For technical reasons, "@#%&*! Smilers" redirects here. For the album, see Fucking Smilers.

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At sign

The at sign, @, normally read aloud as "at", also commonly called the at symbol or commercial at, is originally an accounting and commercial invoice abbreviation meaning "at a rate of" (e.g. 7 widgets @ £2 = £14). In contemporary use, the at sign is most commonly used in email addresses. It was not included on the keyboard of the earliest commercially successful typewriters, but was on at least one 1889 model[1] and the very successful Underwood models from the "Underwood No. 5" in 1900 onward. It is now universally included on computer keyboards. The mark is encoded at U+0040 @ COMMERCIAL AT (HTML @).

The fact that there is no single word in English for the symbol has prompted some writers to use the French arobase[2] or Spanish and Portuguese arroba, or to coin new words such as asperand,[3] ampersat[4] and strudel[5]), but none of these has achieved wide usage.

History of Usage

Origin theories

@ symbol used as the initial "a" for the "amin" (amen) formula in the Bulgarian translation of the Manasses Chronicle (c. 1345).
The Aragonese @ symbol used in the 1448 "taula de Ariza" registry to denote a wheat shipment from Castile to the Kingdom of Aragon.[6]
@ used to signify French "à" ("at") from a 1674 protocol from a Swedish court (Arboga rådhusrätt och magistrat)

The earliest yet discovered reference to the @ symbol is a religious one; it features in a Bulgarian translation of a Greek chronicle written by Constantinos Manasses in 1345 (See Figure left). Held today in the Vatican Apostolic Library,[7] it features the @ symbol in place of the capital letter alpha 'A' in the word Amen. Why it was used in this context is still a mystery.

In terms of the commercial character of the at sign, there are several theories pending verification.

History

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 "a quarter" (الربع pronounced ar-rubʿ).[8] An Italian academic 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.[9] The document is about commerce with Pizarro, in particular the price of an @ of wine in Peru. In Italian, the symbol was interpreted to mean amphora (anfora). Currently, the word arroba means both the at-symbol and a unit of weight. In Italian, the symbol represents one amphora, a unit of weight and volume based upon the capacity of the standard amphora jar, and entered modern meaning and use as "at the rate of" or "at price of" in northern Europe.

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.[9]

Modern use

Commercial usage

In contemporary English usage, @ is a commercial symbol, called at site or at rate meaning at and at the rate of. It has rarely been used in financial documents or grocers' price tags, and is not used in standard typography.[10]

Since 23 October 2012, the At-sign is registered as a trade mark by the German Patent and Trade Mark Office—DPMA (registration number 302012038338) for @T.E.L.L. While company promoters have claimed that it may from now on be illegal for other commercial interests to use the At-sign, this only applies to identical or confusingly similar goods [11] and no court, German or otherwise, has yet ruled on this purported illegality. A cancellation request was filed in 2013.[12]

Contemporary usage

A common contemporary use of @ is in email addresses (using the SMTP system), as in jdoe@example.com (the user jdoe located at site the example.com domain). BBN Technologies' Ray Tomlinson is credited with introducing this usage in 1971.[13] 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 jdoe@example.net 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.

Another contemporary use of the @ symbol in American English is adding information about a sporting event. Opposing sports teams sometimes have their names separated by a v. (for versus). However, the "v." may be replaced with "@" when also conveying at which team's home field the game will be played. In this case, the away team is written first.[14] This usage is not followed in British English, since conventionally the home team is written first.

On some online forums without threaded discussions, @ is 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 "@Keirsten" 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 (such as Twitter and GNU social-based microblogs), @ before the user name is used to send publicly readable replies (e.g. "@otheruser: Message text here"). 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.[15] In Internet Relay Chat (IRC), it is shown before users' nicks to denote they have operator status on a channel.

Programming

@ is used in various programming languages although there is not a consistent theme to its usage. For example:

Gender-neutrality in Spanish and Portuguese

In Portuguese and Spanish, as well in other West Iberian languages 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,[23] which some advocates of gender-neutral language-modification feel indicates implicit linguistic disregard for women. These languages do not possess a neutral gender and the masculine forms are also used traditionally when referring to groups of mixed or unknown sex. The at-sign is intended to replace the desinence '-o', including its plural form '-os', due to the resemblance to a digraph of an inner letter 'a' and an outer letter 'o'.

The Spanish and Portuguese word amigos is an example of the @ being used for gender-inclusive purposes.. When the word represents not only male friends, but also female ones, the proponents of a gender-inclusive language replace it with amig@s. In this sense, amigos would be used only when the writer is sure the group referred to is all-male. Usage of amigas is the same in traditional and such new forms of communication. Alternative forms for a gender-inclusive at-sign would be the slash sign (amigos/as) and the circle-A, (amigⒶs). However, it is more common to use the masculine ending first and include the feminine in parentheses, as in amigos(as). For more about this, see Satiric misspelling. Lately, though, it's becoming more and more common (since slashes and parentheses put first the masculine form and the other two are seen as "an 'a' inside an 'o'", meaning, in their eyes, that the feminine is supedited to the masculine) to use the 'x' letter instead, a use that is the choice of advocates of gender-inclusive language, but strongly frowned upon by people not adhered to said movement (but not necessarily against it). The Real Academia Española disapproves of the use of the at-sign as a letter.[24]

Other uses and meanings

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.

@ on a DVK Soviet computer (c. 1984)

Unicode variants

In culture

In roguelike video games such as Brogue, whose graphics are composed of ASCII characters, the player is represented by @.

See also

References

  1. "The @-symbol, part 2 of 2", Shady Characters The secret life of punctuation
  2. "Short Cuts", Daniel Soar, Vol. 31 No. 10 · 28 May 2009 page 18, London Review of Books
  3. "New York's Moma claims @ as a design classic", Jemima Kiss, 28 March 2010, The Observer
  4. "… Tim Gowens offered the highly logical "ampersat" …", 05 February 1996, The Independent
  5. "strudel". FOLDOC. Retrieved 2014-11-21.
  6. "La arroba no es de Sevilla (ni de Italia)". purnas.com. Jorge Romance. Retrieved 2009-06-30.
  7. "Chronicle of Constantinus Manasses". www.worldcat.org. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
  8. "arroba". Diccionario de la Real Academia Española. Retrieved 3 August 2012.
  9. 1 2 Willan, Philip (2000-07-31). "Merchant@Florence Wrote It First 500 Years Ago". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 2010-04-25.
  10. Bringhurst, Robert (2002). The Elements of Typographic Style (version 2.5), p.272. Vancouver: Hartley & Marks. ISBN 0-88179-133-4.
  11. Article 5 Trade Marks Directive, as interpreted in Case C-251/95 Sabel BV v Puma AG [1997] ECR I-6191
  12. same source
  13. "The First Email".
  14. For an example, see: http://www.nfl.com/schedules
  15. "Tag Friends in Your Status and Posts - Facebook Blog".
  16. 2.4.4.5 String literals,
  17. "2.4.2 Identifiers".
  18. Phil Haack. "Razor syntax quick reference".
  19. ASP.NET MVC 3: Razor’s @: and <text> syntax
  20. PHP: Error Control Operators – Manual
  21. "Visual FoxPro Programming Language Online Help: SET UDFPARMS (Command), or MSDN Library 'How to: Pass Data to Parameters by Reference'.". Microsoft, Inc. Retrieved 2011-02-19.
  22. "Windows PowerShell Language Specification 3.0 (PDF)".
  23. Martell-Otero, Loida (Fall 2009). "Doctoral Studies as Llamamiento, or How We All Need to be 'Ugly Betty'". Perspectivas: 84–106.
  24. DPD 1ͺ ediciσn, 2ͺ tirada
  25. Constable, Peter, and Lorna A. Priest (October 12, 2009) SIL Corporate PUA Assignments 5.2a. SIL International. pp. 59-60. Retrieved on April 12, 2010.
  26. 1 2 "Why @ Is Held in Such High Design Esteem". The New York Times, Alice Rawsthorn, March 21, 2010. 2010-03-22. Archived from the original on 24 March 2010. Retrieved 2010-04-25.
  27. "At last, France has a name for the @ sign", December 9, 2002, iol.co.za
  28. Orthographe fixée par la Commission générale de terminologie et de néologie (Journal officiel du 8 décembre 2002)
  29. "The ARRL Letter", Vol. 23, No. 18, April 30, 2004
  30. "Meeting Twelve – P-51 Mustang, Tempting Fate, Inventions Being Used for Things They Weren't Designed For". The Museum of Curiosity. Season 2. Episode 6. 8 June 2009.
  31. John Lloyd and John Mitchinson (6 November 2006). QI – The Complete First Series: "Factoids" (Audio Commentary) (DVD). BBC and 2 Entertain. OCLC 271537078. UPC 5014503232528.
  32. "English invades Chinese language", August 17, 2007", People's Daily Online
  33. "Couple try to name baby @", August 17, 2007, NZ Herald

External links

Look up commercial-at or at sign in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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