How old is the @ symbol?

Every source I found seemed to have a different date for the origin of the at symbol, so I’m not going to commit to a certain date. Let’s just say it was a long time ago — at least in the Middle Ages.

Many sources, including the Ask Oxford website and a book called “Letter by Letter: An Alphabetical Miscellany,” report that the “at” symbol comes from shorthand for the Latin word “ad” — A.D. — which means “to, toward, or at.” Scribes used to use it to list prices on invoices and accounting sheets, as in “12 eggs AT one penny per egg.”

Names for the @ symbol

The “at” symbol is more formally known in English as the “commercial at,” presumably because of its original use in commerce. It has various names in other languages, and one of my favorites is Italian, in which it is playfully called the “snail.” Longtime listeners or people who have my books will know that in my example sentences, I like to use a character called Squiggly who is a yellow snail. 

I’ve also seen the commercial “at” called a strudel and a cinnamon roll, which are both cute because it is kind of shaped like a rolled up pastry. The Turkish call it a rose, which makes me think of how it used to often be used to make an emoticon rose: typing the “at” symbol for the flower part of the rose, followed by dashes or hyphens for the stem, and sometimes various other punctuation marks to show leaves or thorns. @–>–

Many people seem to think the “at” symbol looks like some kind of appendage. It’s a pig’s tail or elephant’s trunk in Danish, a “cat’s tail” is one name for it in Finnish, and in Dutch it’s called a monkey’s tail. In fact, many languages actually have names for it that have something to do with a monkey or a monkey’s tail. 

And in other languages, it’s just a weird letter A. For example, one older name for it in Chinese was the “lacy A.” Names for it in Vietnamese include the “hooked A” and the “bent A,” in Basque it is called a “wrapped A,” and Serbians call it a “crazy A.”

Why is the ‘a’ in a circle?

Describing how we get from the Latin word “ad” to the “at” symbol, Michael Quinion explained on his website World Wide Words, that when the symbol was written by hand (I believe by scribes in the Middle Ages) “the upstroke of the ‘d’ curved over to the left and extended around the ‘a.’ Eventually the lower part fused with the ‘a’ to form one symbol.” So the circle around the A is actually a remnant of the tall part of the letter D.

But that’s not the only story. 

In the year 2000, Italian history professor Giorgio Stabile reported that he found an “at” symbol in a document written by a Florentine merchant in 1536.

The sentence reads, “There, an amphora [an @] of wine, which is one thirtieth of a barrel, is worth 70 or 80 ducats.”

Instead of meaning “at the price of,” the professor says the “at” was an A that stood for “amphora,” a measure of volume, that was wrapped in a flowing circle that extended from the letter, something that was common to the script of the time.

And then in 2009, a Spanish journalist, Jorge Romance, found an even earlier example in a Castillian document from the 1400s where it was used as an abbreviation for the word “arroba,” which referred to the weight of some wheat.

But regardless of the exact origin of the symbol, we now are more familiar with the “commercial at” because of technology.

@ on keyboards

A book called “Managing Web Usage in the Workplace” tells of examining pictures of old typewriters and finding that it was relatively common for the @ symbol to be included on the keyboard starting around 1880.

@ for email addresses

Ray Tomlinson was the first person to use the “at” symbol to format an email address using ARPAnet in 1971 for a message he sent to himself from one computer to another to test the system, and amusingly, he’s repeatedly been quoted as saying he doesn’t remember what message said — it was just some forgettable test message — because he didn’t think it was a big deal at the time.

@ beyond email

More recently, if you use social media, messaging apps like Slack, and even software like Google Docs, you know that you often use the “at” symbol to tag someone or to refer to their handle or username, but it wasn’t always initiated by the companies.

In the early days of Twitter, for example, users started putting an @ before someone’s name to indicate that it was a reply, and the people at Twitter noticed and wrote it into the system so that when you hit the reply link, it automatically inserts the @ symbol. 

When do you pronounce the @?

The use of an @ symbol before a person’s username has raised an interesting writing question: If the @ only indicates that something is a response or a name, do you pronounce it, and do you write both the word “at” and the “at” symbol? For example, if you wanted to write that people can “find me at @thegrammargirl at Instagram,” how do you actually write that?

Well, in the Q&A section of the AP Stylebook, the editors say that you write both the word “at” and the @ symbol before the handle. They don’t address pronunciation, but I would only say the “at” once: “You can find me at @thegrammargirl.”

The Associated Press also says not to start a sentence with the symbol. If you need to start with a handle, they recommend rewriting the sentence to avoid the problem. For example, instead of writing “@TheGrammarGirl is on Instagram,” [with the @ symbol before the username at the beginning of the sentence] write something like “You can find @TheGrammarGirl on Instagram” [with that username with the silent @ symbol in front of it in the middle of the sentence].

‘A’ or ‘an’ before @?

People also wonder whether to use the word “a” or “an” before a username that starts with the “at” symbol. Since the way you pronounce the first part of the word drives whether you use “a” or “an,” we have to think again about how we would pronounce it. 

Even though you generally write the “at” symbol before the username, you generally don’t pronounce it. Let’s use someone’s username that you wouldn’t also use as a regular name like Grammar Girl. Let’s imagine we’re writing about the We Rate Dogs Twitter account, and for some reason we want to use their handle instead of the general account name. That’s @dog_rates. If we were reading something aloud about one of their posts, we’d call it “a dog_rates post” since “dog” starts with a consonant sound, D, and you use the word “a” before words that start with a consonant sound. 

On the other hand, if we were writing about Randall Munroe, his account is @xkcd, so we’d refer to “an @xkcd post” because X starts with a vowel sound. Eh. Essentially an E-sound. So really, the bottom line is that you just ignore the “at” symbol because you don’t pronounce it. 

And finally to consider how far the “at” symbol has come from designating weights of wheat in the 1400s, Buzzfeed style even allows you to use the “at” symbol as a verb. You can follow it with a hyphen and “ed” or “ing” to say you @-ed someone are are @-ing them.