@ | |
---|---|
At sign | |
In Unicode | U+0040 @ COMMERCIAL AT (@) |
Related | |
See also | U+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.
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). [9] 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. [10] 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. [10] 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. It could also mean “adi” (standard Italian “addì”, i. e. ‘on the day of’) as used on a health pass in Northern Italy in 1667. [11]
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. [12]
In 2012, "@" was registered as a trademark with the German Patent and Trade Mark Office. [13] A cancellation request was filed in 2013, and the cancellation was ultimately confirmed by the German Federal Patent Court in 2017. [14]
A common contemporary use of @ is in
email addresses (using the
SMTP system), as in jdoe@example.com
(the user jdoe
located at the domain example.com
).
Ray Tomlinson of
BBN Technologies is credited for having introduced this usage in 1971.
[4]
[15] This idea of the symbol representing located at in the form user@host
is also seen in other tools and protocols; for example, the
Unix shell command ssh jdoe@example.net
tries to establish an
ssh connection to the computer with the
hostname example.net
using the username jdoe
.
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.
On some social media platforms and forums, usernames may be prefixed with an @ (in the form @johndoe
); this type of username is frequently referred to as a "
handle".[
citation needed]
On online forums without
threaded discussions, @ is commonly used to denote a reply; for instance: @Jane
to respond to a comment Jane made earlier. Similarly, in some cases, @ is used for "attention" in email messages originally sent to someone else. For example, if an email was sent from Catherine to Steve, but in the body of the email, Catherine wants to make Keirsten aware of something, Catherine will start the line @Keirsten
to indicate to Keirsten that the following sentence concerns her.[
citation needed] This also helps with mobile email users who might not see bold or color in email.
In
microblogging (such as on
Twitter,
GNU social- and
ActivityPub-based microblogs), an @ before the user name is used to send publicly readable replies (e.g. @otheruser: Message text here
). The blog and client software can automatically interpret these as links to the user in question. When included as part of a person's or company's contact details, an @ symbol followed by a name is normally understood to refer to a Twitter handle. A similar use of the @ symbol was also made available to Facebook users on September 15, 2009.
[16] In
Internet Relay Chat (IRC), it is shown before users' nicknames to denote they have operator status on a channel.
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. [17][ better source needed] This usage is not followed in British English, since conventionally the home team is written first.[ citation needed]
@ is used in various programming languages and other computer languages, although there is not a consistent theme to its usage. For example:
arrayx[@88]
refers to an array starting at index 88.
[18]@safe
, @nogc
, user defined @('from_user')
which can be evaluated at compile time (with __traits
) or @property
to declare properties, which are functions that can be syntactically treated as if they were fields or variables.
[25]@VMSINSTAL
at the command prompt.@
[26]@array
, including array
slices @array[2..5,7,9]
and
hash slices @hash{'foo', 'bar', 'baz'}
or @hash{qw(foo bar baz)}
. This use is known as a
sigil.@
prefixes
instance variables, and @@
prefixes
class variables.
[34]@
prefixes "annotations" that can be applied to classes or members. Annotations tell the compiler to apply special semantics to the declaration like keywords, without adding keywords to the language.@
prefixes variables and @@
prefixes "niladic" system functions.@1,1 SAY "HELLO"
to show the word "HELLO" in line 1, column 1.
@
at the start of a line suppresses the
echoing of that command. In other words, is the same as ECHO OFF
applied to the current line only. Normally a Windows command is executed and takes effect from the next line onward, but @
is a rare example of a command that takes effect immediately. It is most commonly used in the form @echo off
which not only switches off echoing but prevents the command line itself from being echoed.
[38]
[39]$ORIGIN
, typically the "root" of the domain without a prefixed sub-domain. (Ex: wikipedia.org vs. www.wikipedia.org)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. [42] 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. [43]
This article needs additional citations for
verification. (November 2021) |
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.
In Unicode, the at sign is encoded as U+0040 @ COMMERCIAL AT (@). The named entity @
was introduced in HTML5.
[56]
Preview | @ | @ | ﹫ | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Unicode name | COMMERCIAL AT | FULLWIDTH COMMERCIAL AT | SMALL COMMERCIAL AT | |||
Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex |
Unicode | 64 | U+0040 | 65312 | U+FF20 | 65131 | U+FE6B |
UTF-8 | 64 | 40 | 239 188 160 | EF BC A0 | 239 185 171 | EF B9 AB |
Numeric character reference | @ |
@ |
@ |
@ |
﹫ |
﹫ |
Named character reference | @ | |||||
ASCII and extensions | 64 | 40 | ||||
EBCDIC (037, 500, UTF) [57] [58] [59] | 124 | 7C | ||||
EBCDIC (1026) [60] | 174 | AE | ||||
Shift JIS [61] | 64 | 40 | 129 151 | 81 97 | ||
EUC-JP [62] | 64 | 40 | 161 247 | A1 F7 | ||
EUC-KR [63] / UHC [64] | 64 | 40 | 163 192 | A3 C0 | ||
GB 18030 [65] | 64 | 40 | 163 192 | A3 C0 | 169 136 | A9 88 |
Big5 [66] | 64 | 40 | 162 73 | A2 49 | 162 78 | A2 4E |
EUC-TW | 64 | 40 | 162 233 | A2 E9 | 162 238 | A2 EE |
LaTeX [67] | \MVAt |
… Tim Gowens offered the highly logical "ampersat" …
Germans, Poles, and South Africans call @ "monkey's tail" in each different language.
@ | |
---|---|
At sign | |
In Unicode | U+0040 @ COMMERCIAL AT (@) |
Related | |
See also | U+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.
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). [9] 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. [10] 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. [10] 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. It could also mean “adi” (standard Italian “addì”, i. e. ‘on the day of’) as used on a health pass in Northern Italy in 1667. [11]
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. [12]
In 2012, "@" was registered as a trademark with the German Patent and Trade Mark Office. [13] A cancellation request was filed in 2013, and the cancellation was ultimately confirmed by the German Federal Patent Court in 2017. [14]
A common contemporary use of @ is in
email addresses (using the
SMTP system), as in jdoe@example.com
(the user jdoe
located at the domain example.com
).
Ray Tomlinson of
BBN Technologies is credited for having introduced this usage in 1971.
[4]
[15] This idea of the symbol representing located at in the form user@host
is also seen in other tools and protocols; for example, the
Unix shell command ssh jdoe@example.net
tries to establish an
ssh connection to the computer with the
hostname example.net
using the username jdoe
.
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.
On some social media platforms and forums, usernames may be prefixed with an @ (in the form @johndoe
); this type of username is frequently referred to as a "
handle".[
citation needed]
On online forums without
threaded discussions, @ is commonly used to denote a reply; for instance: @Jane
to respond to a comment Jane made earlier. Similarly, in some cases, @ is used for "attention" in email messages originally sent to someone else. For example, if an email was sent from Catherine to Steve, but in the body of the email, Catherine wants to make Keirsten aware of something, Catherine will start the line @Keirsten
to indicate to Keirsten that the following sentence concerns her.[
citation needed] This also helps with mobile email users who might not see bold or color in email.
In
microblogging (such as on
Twitter,
GNU social- and
ActivityPub-based microblogs), an @ before the user name is used to send publicly readable replies (e.g. @otheruser: Message text here
). The blog and client software can automatically interpret these as links to the user in question. When included as part of a person's or company's contact details, an @ symbol followed by a name is normally understood to refer to a Twitter handle. A similar use of the @ symbol was also made available to Facebook users on September 15, 2009.
[16] In
Internet Relay Chat (IRC), it is shown before users' nicknames to denote they have operator status on a channel.
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. [17][ better source needed] This usage is not followed in British English, since conventionally the home team is written first.[ citation needed]
@ is used in various programming languages and other computer languages, although there is not a consistent theme to its usage. For example:
arrayx[@88]
refers to an array starting at index 88.
[18]@safe
, @nogc
, user defined @('from_user')
which can be evaluated at compile time (with __traits
) or @property
to declare properties, which are functions that can be syntactically treated as if they were fields or variables.
[25]@VMSINSTAL
at the command prompt.@
[26]@array
, including array
slices @array[2..5,7,9]
and
hash slices @hash{'foo', 'bar', 'baz'}
or @hash{qw(foo bar baz)}
. This use is known as a
sigil.@
prefixes
instance variables, and @@
prefixes
class variables.
[34]@
prefixes "annotations" that can be applied to classes or members. Annotations tell the compiler to apply special semantics to the declaration like keywords, without adding keywords to the language.@
prefixes variables and @@
prefixes "niladic" system functions.@1,1 SAY "HELLO"
to show the word "HELLO" in line 1, column 1.
@
at the start of a line suppresses the
echoing of that command. In other words, is the same as ECHO OFF
applied to the current line only. Normally a Windows command is executed and takes effect from the next line onward, but @
is a rare example of a command that takes effect immediately. It is most commonly used in the form @echo off
which not only switches off echoing but prevents the command line itself from being echoed.
[38]
[39]$ORIGIN
, typically the "root" of the domain without a prefixed sub-domain. (Ex: wikipedia.org vs. www.wikipedia.org)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. [42] 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. [43]
This article needs additional citations for
verification. (November 2021) |
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.
In Unicode, the at sign is encoded as U+0040 @ COMMERCIAL AT (@). The named entity @
was introduced in HTML5.
[56]
Preview | @ | @ | ﹫ | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Unicode name | COMMERCIAL AT | FULLWIDTH COMMERCIAL AT | SMALL COMMERCIAL AT | |||
Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex |
Unicode | 64 | U+0040 | 65312 | U+FF20 | 65131 | U+FE6B |
UTF-8 | 64 | 40 | 239 188 160 | EF BC A0 | 239 185 171 | EF B9 AB |
Numeric character reference | @ |
@ |
@ |
@ |
﹫ |
﹫ |
Named character reference | @ | |||||
ASCII and extensions | 64 | 40 | ||||
EBCDIC (037, 500, UTF) [57] [58] [59] | 124 | 7C | ||||
EBCDIC (1026) [60] | 174 | AE | ||||
Shift JIS [61] | 64 | 40 | 129 151 | 81 97 | ||
EUC-JP [62] | 64 | 40 | 161 247 | A1 F7 | ||
EUC-KR [63] / UHC [64] | 64 | 40 | 163 192 | A3 C0 | ||
GB 18030 [65] | 64 | 40 | 163 192 | A3 C0 | 169 136 | A9 88 |
Big5 [66] | 64 | 40 | 162 73 | A2 49 | 162 78 | A2 4E |
EUC-TW | 64 | 40 | 162 233 | A2 E9 | 162 238 | A2 EE |
LaTeX [67] | \MVAt |
… Tim Gowens offered the highly logical "ampersat" …
Germans, Poles, and South Africans call @ "monkey's tail" in each different language.