With the dawn of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, the general public rapidly discovered uses for the sign apart from email addresses. In interacting with groups of people in online message boards, chat rooms, and social media, Internet users found the at sign useful for clarifying “at” which users their messages were directed. Twitter, a microblogging platform that was launched in 2006, embraced the phenomenon and in 2007 began embedding hyperlinks to user profiles and collecting tweets directed at them on a dedicated page. Other social networks followed suit, introducing similar features, and the @ sign soon became a standard tool to facilitate online interactions. The symbol has long been used to represent the various meanings of the Latin ad, whether directional (“to”) or spatial/temporal (“at”).
Idioms and Phrases
Its inclusion on keyboards was intermittent until the late 20th century, when it became a more standard character in computing following its inclusion in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). Founded in 1993, The Motley Fool is a financial services company dedicated to making the world smarter, happier, and richer. The Motley Fool reaches millions of people every month through our premium investing solutions, free guidance and market analysis on Fool.com, top-rated podcasts, and non-profit The Motley Fool Foundation. The adoption of the @ symbol for electronic communication began, predictably but incidentally, with the invention of email in 1971. He settled on @, one of the least utilized characters in ASCII, which was unlikely to appear in user or computer names and had little potential for causing confusion in the command lines of the operating system.
- That low valuation should limit AT&T’s downside potential, and there’s no real reason to sell the stock before it spins off Warner Bros.
- It spun off DirecTV, sold other noncore assets, and agreed to spin off and merge WarnerMedia with Discovery (DISCA) (DISCK).
- AT&T claims that as a slimmed-down company, it will focus on expanding its 5G and broadband networks to keep pace with Verizon and T-Mobile in the telecom market.
- Typically, if the phrase with last uses an article or other determiner, it is unspecific and should include in, on, or at.
Commercial usage
The telecom giant will undergo a massive transformation this year. Similarly, you can also omit in, on, or at when using last as an adjective before a time period, as long as you are talking about a specific time. It is the ligature form of the Latin word “ad”, which means “at”. 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.
Examples of at in a Sentence
AT&T will also reduce its annual dividend from $2.08 to $1.11 per share, which cuts its forward yield from 9% to 4.8%, to reflect that divestment. Discovery’s shareholders formally approved its merger with WarnerMedia on the same day as AT&T’s investor presentation. The sign is one of several special symbols on the standard English keyboard. However, AT&T has also taken several big steps toward rebooting its business and reducing its leverage over the past year. It spun off DirecTV, sold other noncore assets, and agreed to spin off and merge WarnerMedia with Discovery (DISCA) (DISCK).
The words in, on, and at are prepositions of both time and place. In fact, the very earliest records that contain @ or similar shapes did not use them to represent a preposition. The first known use of the symbol in its traditional commercial sense is in a 1536 Spanish-language letter from a Florentine merchant. It stood for a unit of volume, arroba (“quadrantal”; from Arabic al-rubʿ, “one-fourth”), which represented the capacity of a standard amphora, a vessel used to store and transport liquids, cereals, and other goods. This use of the symbol was so widespread in Mediterranean trade that it is still called arroba in Spanish and Portuguese today. It was absent from the first typewriter, invented in 1867, and first appeared on a typewriter in 1885.
It expects its adjusted earnings per share (EPS), which will be affected by a higher tax rate, to grow 0% to 2%. In English, prepositions are a type of word class that shows relationships between other words in a sentence. Prepositions can describe when something happened (“in the morning”) or where something happened (“at the office”), as well as explain connections (“mother of three puppies”) or give extra details (“a movie with subtitles”). That low valuation should limit AT&T’s downside potential, and there’s no real reason to sell the stock before it spins off Warner Bros.
It will allocate about $5 billion each year to the expansion of its 5G networks. The market doesn’t seem impressed by AT&T’s plans so far, but the company recently provided a clearer update during its analyst and investor day on March 11. Let’s review the key points to see if the company can finally generate positive returns over the next 12 months. However, if you’re using last with an unspecified time, you still need a preposition.
Discovery — which will essentially be paid out as a special dividend for its existing investors. After that divestment, investors will likely consider AT&T to be a safe haven stock again as inflation, rising interest rates, and other macro headwinds feed the ongoing rotation toward stable value stocks with high dividends. Based on AT&T’s goals and its current price of $23, its stock trades at just nine times its 2022 earnings. Verizon, which is expected to generate less than 2% earnings growth this year, trades at 10 times that estimate. AT&T also plans to boost its capital investment from $20.1 billion in 2021 (on a pro forma basis) to about $24 billion in both 2022 and 2023.
But the origins of the symbol’s form and meaning remain obscure. Several theories posit its original conception as a sort of ligature combining the letter “a” with another character or diacritic. The classicist Berthold Ullman suggested it represents the Latin ad itself, combining a with an uncial d (ꝺ), although he never expounded on the evidence for this conjecture. Others have pointed to the symbol’s historical usage in French writing to represent à (“to,” “at”; derived from Latin ad), but there are no indications that the sign first developed as a combination of a with a grave accent (`). What makes in, on, and at challenging is that they are prepositions of both time and place. That means each one has at least two different meanings, and all of those meanings can easily get mixed up.
On a pro forma basis, which excludes its divestments and spin-offs, it expects its revenue to rise by the low single digits. It expects its wireless service revenue to increase by more than 3%, and for its broadband revenue to grow by at least 6%. AT&T claims that as a slimmed-down company, it will focus on expanding its 5G and broadband networks to keep pace with Verizon and T-Mobile in the telecom market. Discovery, should fare better as a stand-alone company that isn’t shackled to an aging telecom company. However, sometimes the same words or sentence can use different prepositions, although the meaning will change slightly. 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. AT&T expects its pro forma free cash flow to dip from $19.2 billion in 2021 to $16 billion in 2022 as it ramps up those investments, but to rise to about $20 billion in 2023 as its growth stabilizes. It intends to easily cover its dividend payments in 2023 with a healthy cash dividend payout ratio of 40%. It expects its adjusted EBITDA to rise 5% to 7% as it benefits from $1.5 billion in cost transformation savings, and for its adjusted EPS to grow roughly 2% to 7%. Those stable growth rates should make it more comparable to Verizon, which easily outperformed AT&T over the past five years by steering clear of massive pay-TV and media acquisitions.
Let’s start with reviewing how English prepositions work in general. These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word ‘at.’ Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. The @ shape has been noted in documents dated as early as the 14th century.
Typically, if the phrase with last uses an article or other determiner, it is unspecific and should include in, on, or at. For example, the prepositional phrase “behind the tall tree” includes the preposition behind, the object of the preposition tree, the article the, and the adjective tall. This noun acts as the object of a preposition because it is what the preposition refers to. Combining the preposition and the object of the preposition creates a prepositional phrase, which also includes any adjectives or determiners the noun uses. When the deal closes, AT&T’s investors will receive a 0.24 share of Warner Bros.
But, because its meaning in those documents bears no evident connection to the sign’s later commercial use, the similarity in form of the a-based symbol may simply be coincidental. A common contemporary use of @ is in email addresses (using the SMTP system), as in (the user jdoe located at the domain example.com). Get stock recommendations, portfolio guidance, and more from The Motley Fool’s premium services. It expects its revenue to grow by the low single digits again, with low single-digit growth in its wireless service business and mid- to high-single-digit percentage growth for its broadband business.
AT&T (T -0.05%) was once considered a solid stock for conservative income investors. Yet over the past five years, the telecom giant’s stock lost nearly half its market value as the company made a series of debt-fueled acquisitions — including DirecTV and Time Warner — and struggled to expand its wireless business. When using next as an adjective before a time, you can omit in, on, or at. We discuss the rules for each as prepositions of both time and place and share some examples of in, on, and at sentences.
To make things more difficult, in, on, and at are not interchangeable—you have to learn all the usages for each to avoid confusing them. The English prepositions in, on, and at are some of the most common words in our language, but they can easily get mixed up. Confusion can arise because not only are they all prepositions of place, but they’re also all prepositions of time; being prepositions of both time and place can make these two-letter words difficult to use.