At sign: Encyclopedia - At sign

At sign

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ampersand ( & )
asterisk ( * )
asterism ( ⁂ )
at ( @ )
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A commercial at, @, also called an at symbol, an at sign, or just at, and sometimes mistakenly called an ampersand (& is the ampersand), is a cursive form of ā, an abbreviation of debated origin. It is assigned to Unicode code point U+0040 (ASCII character 64). Its formal name comes from its commercial use in invoices, as in, "7 widgets @ £2 ea. = £14". It is also known as: about; ampersat or asperand (compare ampersand); amphora; ape; arobase; atgry; cabbage; cat; cinnabun or cinnamon bun; commercial symbol; cyclone; each; mercantile symbol; rose; schnable; scroll or scroll-a; snail; strudel; these; vortex; whirlpool; or whorl. Some of these are based on specialized usage, others are visual descriptions, and atgry (plural atgrynge) is a recurring joke proposed on Usenet as the answer to a pair of longstanding linguistic riddles — the singular atgry is a third word that ends in gry, along with angry and hungry, and the plural atgrynge provides a word that rhymes with orange [1].

At sign - Modern uses

The symbol's most familiar modern use is in e-mail addresses (sent by SMTP), as in jdoe@example.com ("the user named ‘jdoe’ working at the computer named ‘example’ in the ‘com’ domain"). Ray Tomlinson is credited with the introduction of this use in 1972. This idea of user@host is seen in many other tools and protocols as well: for example, the command ssh jdoe@www.example.com would try to establish a ssh connection to the box with the hostname www.example.com using the username jdoe.

In the programming language Perl, the symbol prefixes variables which contain arrays, as opposed to scalar values (indicated with '$') and hash tables / associative arrays ('%'). If the code were to be treated as a sentence, this prefix would be the equivalent of a determiner, so "@animals" might be read as "these animals".

In the IRC protocol, @ is the symbol for a channel operator. IRC also uses the user@host form (often preceded by nick!) for identifying and banning users. In this case the user@ part was originally an ident response and the host part was a reverse dns name from the user's IP. However, most modern IRC networks provide some mechanism for users to hide their real reverse dns hostname and/or for admins/privileged users to pick one arbitrarily.

The @ character is also used for typing in some Romance languages as a gender-neutral substitute for the masculine "o" in mixed gender groups and in cases where the gender is unknown. For example, the Spanish word "amigos," which could either mean male and female "friends" or all male "friends" would be replaced with "amig@s." The character is intended to resemble a mix of the masculine letter "o" and the feminine "a". The usefulness of this is debated; in Spanish the masculine grammatical gender may include both males and females, while the feminine gender is exclusive to females, and there is no neutral gender. Some advocates of gender-neutral language-modification feel that using the male grammatical gender as a generic gender indicates an implicit linguistic disregard for women. Many Spanish speakers feel that this use of the "@" degrades their language, and some allege that it is an example of cultural imperialism. This construction is generally only used in informal writing.

In Pokémon communities, it is used as a symbol to denote Latios or Latias

In most roguelike games (such as NetHack), the "@" sign is used to denote the player character (or more generally, any human).

The "@" sign is also used in some cases (obituaries, brief reports) to denote an alias after a person's proper name, for instance: "John Smith @ Jean Smyth".

@ may sometimes be used to represent a schwa, as the actual schwa character may be difficult to produce in many computers.

In online discourse, the "@" sign is used by some anarchists as a substitute for the traditional circle-A.

At sign - History

@ appears to be the cursive form of ā, an abbreviation of an unknown word beginning with a. In medieval European manuscripts, abbreviations were generally indicated by drawing a line over or through the letters, as in the common IX for Jesus Christ, or # from lb for libra 'pound'. In the typeface of the Gutenberg Bible, ā stands for either an or am within words. However, it is not known which particular word gave rise to modern @.

A commonly accepted theory is that the symbol is derived from the Latin preposition ad, which means about with numerals. However, no document showing this usage has been presented.

A similar idea is that @ is the abbreviation of the Greek preposition ana, which means 'at the rate of' when used with numerals, exactly its modern commercial usage.

A more recent idea has been proposed by Giorgio Stabile, a professor of history in Rome. He claims to have traced the symbol back to the Italian Renaissance in a Venetian mercantile document signed by Francesco Lapi on May 4, 1536. The document talks about commerces with Pizarro and in particular the price of an @ of wine in Peru, where <@> stood for amphora (Italian anfora; Spanish and Portuguese arroba). The word arroba still means both the @ symbol and a unit of weight (see below). Under this view, the symbol was used to represent one amphora, which was a unit of weight or volume based upon the capacity of the standard terracotta jar, and came into use with the modern meaning "at the rate of" in northern Europe.

However, @ could be the abbreviation of any word beginning in a, and more than one such symbol was likely in use, but there is no continuous record between any of the possibilities and the modern symbol.

At sign - Commercial at in other languages

In most languages other than English, the symbol was virtually unknown before e-mail became widespread in the mid-1990s. Consequently, it is often perceived in those languages as denoting "The Internet", computerization, or modernization in general.

• In Bulgarian, it is called кльомба ("klyomba", means nothing else) or маймунско а ("monkey A").
• In Dutch, it is called apenstaartje ("little monkey-tail").
• In Spain, Portugal, Mexico, and Brazil, it denotes a weight of about 25 pounds. The weight and the symbol are called arroba. (In Brazil, cattle is still priced by the arroba — now rounded to 15 kg). It is also called the "a comercial" (the 'commercial a')
• The French name is arobas or a commercial, and sometimes escargot ("snail"). Other names include queue de singe (monkey-tail) and a dans le rond (a in the circle).
• In Modern Hebrew, it is colloquially known as strudel (שטרודל). The normative term, invented by the Academy of the Hebrew Language, is kruhit (כרוכית), which is a Hebrew word for strudel.
• In Italian it is chiocciola ("snail"), sometimes at or ad(pronounced more often /ɛt/, and rarely /at/, instead of /æt/).
• In German, it is Klammeraffe, meaning "clinging monkey", or kaufmännisches A, meaning "commercial A".
• In Danish, it is snabel-a ("(animal's) trunk-a").
• In Finnish, it was originally called taksamerkki ("fee sign") or yksikköhinnan merkki ("unit price sign"), but these names are long obsolete and now rarely understood. Nowadays, it is officially ät-merkki, according to the national standardization institute SFS; frequently also spelled "at-merkki". Other names include kissanhäntä, ("cat's tail") and miukumauku ("the miaow sign").
• In Korean, it is golbaeng-i (골뱅이), a dialectal form of daseulgi (다슬기), a small freshwater snail with no tentacles.
• In Lithuanian, it is eta (equivalent to English at but with Lithuanian ending)
• In Mandarin Chinese, it is xiao laoshu (小老鼠), meaning "tiny mouse", or laoshu hao (老鼠號, "mouse sign").
• In Persian it is at (using the English pronunciation).
• In Polish, officially it is called atka, but commonly małpa (monkey) or małpka (little monkey).
• In Romanian, it is Coadă de maimuţă (monkey-tail) or "a-rond"
• In Russian, sobaka (собака) (dog) or sometimes sobachka (собачка) (doggy)
• In Swedish, it is called snabel-a ("(elephant's) trunk-a")
• In Slovenian, it is called afna (little monkey)
• In Hungarian, it is called kukac (worm or maggot).
• In Czech and Slovak, it is called zavináč (rolled pickled herring).
• In Norwegian, it is officially called krøllalfa ("curly alpha" or "alpha twirl"). (The alternate alfakrøll is also common.)
• In Catalan it is called arrova or ensaïmada, the roll brioche typical from Majorca.
• In Japanese it is called naruto (ナルト, "maelstrom", often used with connotations to spirals), or attomāku (アットマーク, "at mark") a combination of English words, known as wasei-eigo.
• In Turkish it is et (using the English pronunciation). Also called as güzel a (beautiful a), özel a (special a), salyangoz (snail)
• In Greek it is called παπάκι (small duck) although παπάκι (small duck) is best suited to the Ampersand sign (&).
• In Esperanto, it is called ĉe-signo ("at" - for the e-mail use, with an address pronounced zamenhof ĉe esperanto punkto org ), po-signo ("each" -- refers only to the mathematical use) or heliko ("snail").
• In Vietnamese, it is called a còng (a-circle).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "At sign", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki