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The @ sign was invented many centuries ago, long before the advent of the internet. Take a look at the keyboards of some 19th-century typewriters and you'll find a dedicated @ key sitting right there among the letters and other symbols. Its users certainly weren't emailing colleagues or tagging friends on social media, so what was it doing there?
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.There are a few theories of where and why the @ came to be. The first documented use of @ was in 1536, although some argue that the symbol dates back to the sixth or seventh centuries.
It's said that lazy Latin scribes would have to endlessly copy manuscripts by hand, so they developed shortcuts to get the job done quicker. This is where the & symbol, the ampersand, originated from. The @ evolved similarly as a shorthand for the Latin word ad — meaning "at," "to," or "toward" — essentially an "a" with the "d" swept into a looping tail.
A more mysterious piece of evidence can be seen in a Bulgarian translation of a Greek chronicle from 1345 CE, which uses the @ symbol in place of the A in the word Amen. Why the scribes did this once, then never again, remains unclear.
Yet another theory points to French scribes using it as an ornate scrawling of à, also meaning "at." This would neatly align with how the symbol is used in internet culture today, though the evidence for it is thin.
The clearest historical breakthrough arrived in 2000 when Giorgio Stabile, a professor of the history of science at La Sapienza University in Italy, discovered the @ sign in a letter written by a Florentine merchant on May 4, 1536. The symbol was used to "at the price of" — as in, one jug of olive oil @ a certain sum of money.
This links to how the @ symbol was used in the 19th century, when accountants and shopkeepers adopted it for exactly the same purpose, tapping it into their ledgers on typewriters.
Its modern resurrection came in 1971 when computer scientist Ray Tomlinson was building the first email program on ARPANET, the Pentagon-funded grandpa of the internet. He needed a symbol that could signal to the operating system it was reading an address – something that was distinct, unambiguous, and not already used in everyday language or computer code. The @ fit perfectly.
“I was mostly looking for a symbol that wasn’t used much,” he told The Smithsonian in 2012. “And there weren’t a lot of options—an exclamation point or a comma. I could have used an equal sign, but that wouldn’t have made much sense.”
And with that decision, Tomlinson salvaged a centuries-old symbol from the precipice of extinction and transformed it into the defining emblem of our times. Don't @ me.
As a side note to end on, the @ sign goes by a wonderful and creative array of names in other languages around the world.
- In Afrikaans, it is called aapstert, meaning “monkey’s tail”.
- In Danish, some call it snabel-a, meaning “elephant’s trunk,” or grisehale, meaning “pig’s tail”.
- In French, its nickname is the escargot, meaning “snail” or petit escargot, meaning “little snail”.
- In Hebrew, it can be called the shtrudl, meaning “strudel”.
- In Russia, it’s dubbed the sobachka, meaning “little dog”.
- In Thai, people sometimes say it's a ai tua yiukyiu, meaning something like “the wiggling worm-like character”.
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