At sign Totally Explained

Everything about At Sign totally explained

The typographic character @, the at sign, denotes a pan-lingual abbreviation of the word 'at'. It began use as the shorthand for the phrase "at the rate of" in accounting and commercial invoices, for example “7 widgets @ $2 ea. = $14”. Nowadays, this commercial character is ubiquitous because it appears in all e-mail addresses. In English, it's informally pronounced as at, and can be referred to as the at sign, the asperand or the at symbol. Its official, typographic character nomenclature is commercial at in the ANSI/CCITT/Unicode character encoding standards. Some historical names are mentioned in the "History" section below.

History

These are some theories about the origin of the commercial at character in modern usage:

Medieval monks abbreviated the Latin word ad (at, toward, by, about) next to a numeral.
It was a 15th-century Spanish unit of weight: arroba = jar.
The abbreviated Greek preposition ανά, ana, meaning at the rate of, its commercial usage.
An Italian academic claims to have traced the @ symbol to the Italian Renaissance, in a Venetian mercantile document signed by Francesco Lapi on May 4, 1537. The document is about commerce with Pizarro, in particular the price of an @ of wine in Peru; @ meant amphora (Italian anfora; Spanish and Portuguese arroba). Currently, the word arroba means the at-symbol and a unit of weight (cf. below). In this usage, the symbol represents one amphora, a unit of weight and volume based upon the capacity of the standard terracotta jar, and entered modern meaning and use as "at the rate of" in northern Europe.
From Norman French "à" meaning "at" in the "each" sense, for example "2 widgets à £5.50 = £11.00" is the accountancy shorthand notation in English commercial vouchers and ledgers to the 1990s, when the e-mail usage superseded the accountancy usage. It also is so used in Modern French and Swedish; in this view, the at-symbol is a stylised form of à that avoids raising the writing hand from the page in drawing the symbol; this compromise between @ and à in French handwriting is in street market signs.
It could be the abbreviation of any word beginning in a.

The @ was present in the 1902 model Lambert typewriter made by Lambert Typewriter Company of New York. Its inclusion in the original 1963 ASCII character went unremarked as it was a standard commercial typewriter character, for example the 1961 IBM Selectric typewriter's keyboard included the @ (at-symbol).

Modern uses

In contemporary English usage, @ is a commercial symbol, meaning at and at the rate of. It has been used, rarely, in financial documents or grocers' price tags, and isn't used in standard typography.
   Its most familiar contemporary use is in e-mail addresses (transmitted by SMTP), as in jdoe@example.com (the user jdoe working at the computer named example in the domain com). Ray Tomlinson is credited with introducing this usage in 1971. This idea of the symbol representing located at in the form "user@host" also is seen in other tools and protocols: the command ssh jdoe@www.example.com tries to establish a ssh connection to the computer with the hostname www.example.com using the username jdoe.
   The @ is used in various programming languages though there isn't a consistent theme to its usage. For example, in Perl, @ prefixes variables which contain arrays; in PHP, it's used just before a function to make the interpreter suppress errors that would be generated when using that function; in C#, @ is the literal string operator meaning that the string should be used "as is" and not be processed for escape sequences; in Python 2.4 and up, it's used to decorate a function (wrap the function in another one at creation time); in Java, it's used to denote annotations, a kind of metadata, since version 5.0; in Ruby, @ prefixes instance variables, and @@ prefixes class variables.
   In modal logic, specifically when representing possible worlds, @ is sometimes used as a logical symbol to denote the actual world (the world we're 'at').
   The @ is used as an alternative political spelling for typing in some Romance languages as a gender-neutral substitute for the masculine "o" in mixed sex groups and in cases where the sex is unknown. For example, the Portuguese/Spanish word "amigos" (friends), which can mean men and women friends or all men friends would be replaced with "amig@s". The character is intended to resemble a digraph of both the masculine letter "o" and the feminine letter "a". The usefulness of this is debatable; in Portuguese/Spanish, the masculine grammatical gender may include both men and women, while the feminine gender is exclusively for and about women; there's no neuter gender for most nouns. Some advocates of gender-neutral language-modification feel that using the male grammatical gender as a generic gender designator indicates implicit linguistic disregard for women. Many Portuguese/Spanish speakers think that this usage of the @ (at-sign) degrades Portuguese/Spanish; some argue it's just more cultural imperialism; generally, this construction is used only in personal, informal writing, and has no established pronunciation. Alternative forms would be amigos/as and amigⒶs using the circle-A of anarchism as the bisexual digraph.
   In most roguelike games (Angband and NetHack), @ denotes the player character. Some roguelikes also use @ to denote any human being. This usage is because the @ resembles an overhead view of a person's head and shoulders.
   The @ is also used sometimes (for example articles about missing persons, obituaries, brief reports) to denote an alias after a person's proper name, for instance: "John Smith @ Jean Smyth".
   The @ may sometimes be used to represent a schwa, as the actual schwa character "ə" may be difficult to produce in many computers. It is used in this capacity in the ASCII IPA or Kirshenbaum IPA scheme.
   On some online forums without proper Threaded discussions, @ is used to denote a reply, for instance: "@Jane" to respond to a comment Jane made earlier.
   In online discourse, the @ is used by some anarchists as a substitute for the traditional circle-A .
   It is frequently used in Leet as a substitute for the letter A.
   In Malagasy, @ is an informal abbreviation for the prepositional form amin'ny.

"Commercial at" in other languages

In most languages other than English, @ was less common before e-mail became widespread in the mid-1990s, although most typewriters included the symbol. Consequently, it's often perceived in those languages as denoting "The Internet", computerization, or modernization in general.

In Azeri it's at (using the English pronunciation).

In Basque it's called a bildua ("rounded a")

In Belarusian it's called "сьлімак" ("helix", "snail")

In Bulgarian it's called кльомба ("klyomba", means nothing else) or маймунско а (majmunsko a "monkey A").

In Catalan it's called arrova.

In Chinese

In mainland China it's quan a (圈a), meaning "circled a" or hua a (花a, lacy a).
In Taiwan it's xiao laoshu (小老鼠), meaning "little mouse", or laoshu hao (老鼠號, "mouse sign").

In Croatian it's informally called manki, coming from the local pronunciation of the English word, monkey. The Croatian word for monkey, majmun, isn't used to denote the at sign.

In Czech and Slovak it's called zavináč (rollmops).

In Danish it's snabel-a ("(elephant's) trunk-a").

In Dutch it's called apenstaartje ("little monkey-tail").

In Esperanto it's 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 Faroese it's kurla (sounds "curly"), hjá ("at"), tranta and snápila ("(elephant'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's 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 French it's arobase or arrobe or a commercial (though this is most commonly used in French-speaking Canada, and should normally only be used when quoting prices; it should always be called arobase or, better yet, arobas when in an e-mail address), and sometimes a dans le rond (a in the circle). Same origin as Spanish which could be derived from Arabic, ar-roub. Southern French speakers refer to it as le petit escargot ("little snail") due to its appearance, or le a avec le queue du marsupilami, in refers to a comic.

In German it sometimes used to be referred to as Klammeraffe (meaning "spider monkey"). Klammeraffe refers to the similarity of the @ to the tail of a monkey grabbing a branch. Lately, it's mostly called at just like in English

In Greek, it's most often referred to as papaki (παπάκι), meaning "duckling," due to the similarity it bears with comic character designs for ducks.

In Greenlandic Inuit language - it's called aajusaq meaning "a-like" or "something that looks like a"

In Hebrew it's colloquially known as shtrudel (שטרודל). The normative term, invented by the Academy of the Hebrew Language, is krukhit (כרוכית), which is a Hebrew word for strudel.

In Hungarian it's officially called kukac ("worm, mite, or maggot").

In Icelandic it's referred to as "at merkið (the at-sign)" or "hjá" which is a direct translation of at.

In Indonesian it's et,a bundar, meaning "circle A".

In Italian it's chiocciola ("snail") or a commerciale, sometimes at (pronounced more often /ɛt/, and rarely /at/, instead of /æt/) or ad.

In Japanese it's called attomāku (アットマーク, "at mark"). The word is a wasei-eigo, which are Japanese vocabulary forged from the English language or Gairaigo foreign loan words in general. It is sometimes called naruto, because of Naruto whirlpool or food (kamaboko).

In Korean it's called golbaeng-i (골뱅이; bai top shells), a dialectal form of daseulgi (다슬기), a small freshwater snail with no tentacles.

In Latvian it's pronunced same as in English, but, since in Latvian [æ] is written as "e" not "a" (as in English), it's sometimes written as et.

In Lithuanian it's eta (equivalent to English at but with Lithuanian ending)

In Luxembourgish it used to be called Afeschwanz (monkey-tail), but due to widespread use it's now pronounced 'at' like in English.

In Macedonian it's called мајмунче (pronun. my-moon-cheh, little monkey)

In Morse Code it's known as a "commat," consisting of the Morse code for the "A" and "C" run together as one character: (·--·-·). This occurred in 2004 .

In Norwegian it's officially called krøllalfa ("curly alpha" or "alpha twirl"). (The alternate alfakrøll is also common. Sometimes Snabel a(trunk a, as in elephant's trunk) is used. )

In Persian it's at (using the English pronunciation).

In Portuguese, while there are regional variations, it's typically considered as representing approximately 25 pounds, 11.5 kg, and both the weight and the symbol are called arroba. In Brazil, cattle are still priced by the arroba — now rounded to 15 kg.

In Polish it's called, both officially and commonly małpa (monkey); sometimes also małpka (little monkey) or bałwanek (little snowman).

In Romanian it's Coadă de maimuţă (monkey-tail) or "a-rond"

In Russian it's most commonly sobaka (собака) (dog).

In Serbian it's called лудо А (ludo A crazy A) or мајмун (majmun monkey)

In Slovenian it's called afna (little monkey)

In Spanish speaking countries it denotes a pre-metric unit of weight. While there are regional variations in Spain and Mexico it's typically considered to represent approximately 25 pounds (11.5 kg), and both the weight and the symbol are called arroba. It has also been used as a unit of volume for wine and oil.

In Swedish it's called snabel-a ("(elephant's) trunk-a"), (cinnamon bun) or simply "at" like in the English language.

In Swiss German it's commonly called Affeschwanz ("monkey-tail").

In Tagalog it's commonly called utong ("nipple").

In Turkish it's et (using the English pronunciation). Also called as güzel a (beautiful a), özel a (special a), salyangoz (snail), koç (ram), kuyruklu a (a with tail) and çengelli a (a with hook).

In Ukrainian it's commonly called et ("at"), other names being ravlyk (равлик) (snail), slymachok (слимачок) (little slug), vukho (вухо) (ear) and pesyk (песик) (little dog).

In Vietnamese it's called a còng (bent a) in the North and a móc (hooked a) in the South.

In Welsh it's sometimes known as a malwen or malwoden (a snail).Further Information

Get more info on 'At Sign'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://at_sign.totallyexplained.com">At sign Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.