At sign

@
At sign
In UnicodeU+0040 @ COMMERCIAL AT (@)
Related
See alsoU+FF20 FULLWIDTH COMMERCIAL AT
U+FE6B SMALL COMMERCIAL AT

The at sign, @, is an accounting and invoice abbreviation meaning "at a rate of" (e.g. 7 widgets @ £2 per widget = £14),[1] 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.

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.

  1. ^ See, for example, Browns Index to Photocomposition Typography (p. 37), Greenwood Publishing, 1983, ISBN 0946824002
  2. ^ "Short Cuts" Archived 2012-07-23 at the Wayback Machine, Daniel Soar, Vol. 31 No. 10 · 28 May 2009 page 18, London Review of Books
  3. ^ David Bowen (23 October 2011). "Bits & bytes". The Independent. Archived from the original on 9 July 2018. … Tim Gowens offered the highly logical "ampersat" …
  4. ^ Jemima Kiss (28 March 2010). "New York's Moma claims @ as a design classic". The Observer. Archived from the original on 5 March 2017. Retrieved 14 December 2016.
  5. ^ "strudel". FOLDOC. Archived from the original on 2014-11-29. Retrieved 2014-11-21.
  6. ^ "The @-symbol, part 2 of 2" Archived 2014-12-25 at the Wayback Machine, Shady Characters ⌂ The secret life of punctuation Archived 2014-12-21 at the Wayback Machine