The at sign, @, is normally read aloud as "at"; it is also commonly called the at symbol, commercial at, or address sign. It is used as an accounting and invoice abbreviation meaning "at a rate of" (e.g. 7 widgets @ £2 per widget = £14),[1] 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[2] or Spanish and Portuguese arroba, or to coin new words such as ampersat[3] and asperand,[4] or the (visual) onomatopoeia strudel,[5] but none of these have achieved wide use. Although not included on the keyboard of the earliest commercially successful typewriters, it was on at least one 1889 model[6] 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[edit]@ symbol used as the initial "a" for the "amin" (amen) formula in the Bulgarian of the Manasses Chronicle (c. 1345). @ used to signify French "à" ("at") from a 1674 protocol from a Swedish court (Arboga rådhusrätt och magistrat) 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" (الربع pronounced ar-rubʿ).[8] 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.[9] 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.[9] 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 (anfora), a unit of weight and volume based upon the capacity of the standard amphora jar since the 6th century. Modern use[edit]Commercial usage[edit]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.[10] Trademark[edit]In 2012, "@" was registered as a trademark with the German Patent and Trade Mark Office.[11] A cancellation request was filed in 2013, and the cancellation was ultimately confirmed by the German Federal Patent Court in 2017.[12] Email addresses[edit]A common contemporary use of @ is in email addresses (using the
SMTP system), as in On web pages, organizations often obscure the 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. [edit]On some social media platforms and forums, usernames may be prefixed with an @ (in the form
On online forums without
threaded discussions, @ is commonly used to denote a reply; for instance: In
microblogging (such as on Twitter and GNU social-based microblogs), an @ before the user name is used to send publicly readable replies (e.g. Sports usage[edit]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.[15] This usage is not followed in British English, since conventionally the home team is written first. Computer languages[edit]@ is used in various programming languages and other computer languages, although there is not a consistent theme to its usage. For example:
Gender neutrality in Spanish[edit]Protester with banner showing "La revolución está en nosotr@s" 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.[35] 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.[36] Other uses and meanings[edit]X-SAMPA uses an @ as a substitute for ə, which it resembles in some fonts.
Names in other languages[edit]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.
@ on a DVK Soviet computer (c. 1984)
Unicode[edit]In Unicode, the at sign is encoded
as U+0040@ COMMERCIAL AT (@). The named entity Variants[edit]Character information
See also[edit]
References[edit]
External links[edit]Wikimedia Commons has media related to At sign.
What is mean @?On the Internet, @ (pronounced "at" or "at sign" or "address sign") is the symbol in an E-mail address that separates the name of the user from the user's Internet address, as in this hypothetical e-mail address example: [email protected].
What is the use at?At is a preposition. We use at to refer to time or place. We also use it to refer to activities.
How do you use at in a sentence?Example Sentences Using “At”. I sat at my table and cried. ( ... . Let's meet at 11:45.. The car will stop at the curb.. The dog scratched at the screen.. Their wedding was at the town hall.. There were tens of thousands of people at JLo's latest concert.. They laughed at all his jokes.. The tiger lunged at the monkey.. What is the saying to at?Definition of 'to a T'
You can use to a T or to a tee to mean perfectly or exactly right. For example, if something suits you to a T, it suits you perfectly. If you have an activity or skill down to a T, you have succeeded in doing it exactly right.
|