Commercial at

A commercial at, @, also called an at symbol, an "at sign", or just at, is a symbolic abbreviation for the word at. Its formal name comes from its commercial use in invoices, as in, "7 widgets @ £2 ea. = £14". It is also known as strudel, and, rarely, each, vortex, and whorl, and INTERCAL: whirlpool, cyclone, snail, ape, cat, rose, cabbage, amphora.

Its most familiar use today is in e-mail addresses: e.g., jdoe@widget.com. It is ironic that @ has become a trendy mark of the Internet since it is a very old symbol, derived from the Latin preposition "ad" (at). Giorgio Stabile[?], a professor of history in Rome, has traced the symbol back to the Italian Renaissance[?] in a Roman mercantile document signed by Francesco Lapi[?] on May 4, 1536 (1536-05-04).

In Dutch it is called "apestaartje" (little monkey-tail). The French name is "arobase" and sometimes "escargot." In Spain and Portugal it denotes a weight of about 25 pounds, the weight and the symbol are called "arroba". Italians call it "chiocciola" (snail). In German it is "klammeraffe," "spider monkey." In Danish it is either "grishale" ("pig's tail") or "snabel-a" ("(animal's) trunk-a"). In Finnish it is "kissanhäntä" ("cat's tail") or "miukumauku" ("miaow" as in the sound made by a cat).

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In computer programming, the commercial at corresponds to Unicode and ASCII character 64, or 0x0040.

This article (or an earlier version of it) contains material from FOLDOC, used with permission.