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.
Examples of at in a Sentence
- The first known use of the symbol in its traditional commercial sense is in a 1536 Spanish-language letter from a Florentine merchant.
- It was absent from the first typewriter, invented in 1867, and first appeared on a typewriter in 1885.
- The sign is one of several special symbols on the standard English keyboard.
- 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.
- This use of the symbol was so widespread in Mediterranean trade that it is still called arroba in Spanish and Portuguese today.
- This practice, known as address munging, makes the email addresses less vulnerable to spam programs that scan the internet for them.
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 sign is one of several special symbols on the standard English keyboard. 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.
Absent Letters That Are Heard Anyway
Its use in commerce and accounting continued into the present day, lending ultimately to the symbol’s original English-language name, the “commercial a.” It remained relatively obscure, nonetheless, and was not always present on keyboards or in character sets for computing. It was absent from the first typewriter, invented in 1867, and first appeared on a typewriter in 1885. 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). The adoption of the @ symbol for electronic communication began, predictably but incidentally, with the invention of email in 1971.
Popular in Grammar & Usage
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. 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). 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.
When Ray Tomlinson was fiddling with code that would allow users to send messages across ARPANET, the experimental network that preceded the Internet, he needed a marker to separate the name of the user from that of the host terminal. 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. The earliest yet discovered symbol in this shape is found in a Bulgarian translation of a Greek chronicle written by Constantinos Manasses in 1345.
Commercial usage
The symbol has long been used to represent the various meanings of the Latin ad, whether directional (“to”) or spatial/temporal (“at”). 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 (`).
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.