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The @ sign, also known as the at symbol, commercial at, or address sign, is generally read aloud as “at.” It’s most commonly found in email addresses and social media platform handles, but it’s also used as an accounting and invoicing term that means “at a rate of.”

Because there is no single English name for the symbol, some writers have substituted the French arobase or the Spanish and Portuguese arroba, or created new terms like ampersat, asperand, and strudel, but none of these have gained widespread acceptance.

It was on at least one 1889 model and the highly popular Underwood models from the “Underwood No. 5” in 1900 forward, despite not being on the keyboard of the first commercially successful typewriters. It first appeared in email addresses in the 1970s, and it is currently found on all English computer keyboards.

In a Bulgarian translation of a Greek chronicle authored by Constantinos Manasses in 1345, the first sign in this shape has been identified. The @ sign replaces the capital letter alpha “A” in the word Amen, and it is kept at the Vatican Apostolic Library today. It’s unclear why it was utilized in this situation. There is no trace of the symbol’s growth into what it is now.

Whatever the origin of the @ sign, it has a long history of use in Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese as an abbreviation of arroba, a unit of weight corresponding to 25 pounds that is derived from the Arabic term “the quarter” (pronounced ar-rub). Giorgio Stabile, an Italian professor, claims to have discovered the @ sign in a business document sent from Seville to Rome on May 4, 1536, by Florentine Francesco Lapi. The document is about Pizarro’s business dealings, specifically the price of a bottle of wine in Peru. The name arroba now refers to both the at-symbol and a unit of weight. Since the 6th century, the sign has been understood as amphora (anfora), a unit of weight and volume based on the capacity of the ordinary amphora jar.

Even though the oldest fully developed modern @ sign is the one found on the above-mentioned Florentine letter, the first historical document containing a symbol resembling a @ as a commercial symbol is the Spanish “Taula de Ariza,” a registry to denote a wheat shipment from Castile to Aragon in 1448.

In email addresses (using the SMTP system), the @ symbol is commonly used, as in jdoe@example.com (the user jdoe located at the domain example.com). BBN Technologies’ Ray Tomlinson is credited with introducing this use in 1971. The Unix shell command ssh jdoe@example.net tries to create an ssh connection to the computer with the hostname example.net using the username jdoe.

Organizations frequently omit the @ from email addresses of their members or workers on web pages. This approach, known as address munging, reduces the vulnerability of email addresses to spam programs that search the internet for them.

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