Commercial at
- Not to be confused with commercial art.
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, cyclone, snail, ape, cat, rose, cabbage, amphora, ampersat. In the programming language INTERCAL it is known as a whirlpool.
Its most familiar use today is in e-mail addresses, as in jdoe@example.com. Ray Tomlinson introduced this use in 1972.
History
A commonly accepted theory is that the symbol is derived from the Latin preposition "ad" (at). The @ is supposed to be a ligature developed by transcribing monks.
A more recent idea concerning the history of the @ symbol has been proposed by Giorgio Stabile, a professor of history in Rome. He claims to have traced the symbol back to the Italian Renaissance in a Venetian mercantile document signed by Francesco Lapi on May 4, 1536. The document talks about commerces with Pizarro and in particular the price of a @ of wine in Peru. The symbol is still called arroba in Spanish and it represent a unit of weight with the same name (1 arroba = 25 U. S. pounds), an old (Antonio Nebrjia, Salamanca, 1492) Spanish/Latin dictionary translates arroba with amphora.
Under this view, the symbol was used to represent one amphora, which was a unit of weight or volume based upon the capacity of the standard terracotta jar.
The symbol came into use with the modern meaning "at the price of" in northern Europe.
"Commercial at" in other languages
- In Dutch, it is called apenstaartje ("little monkey-tail").
- In Spain and Portugal, it denotes a weight of about 25 pounds. The weight and the symbol are called arroba.
- The French name is arobase (from the Spanish weight measure) and sometimes escargot ("snail").
- In Modern Hebrew, it is colloquially known as Strudel (שטרודל). The normative term, invented by the Academy of the Hebrew Language, is krukhit (כרוכית), which is a Hebrew word for Strudel.
- Italians call it chiocciola ("snail").
- In German, it is Klammeraffe, meaning "clinging monkey", or kaufmännisches A, meaning "commercial A".
- In Danish, it is either grisehale ("pig's tail") or snabel-a ("(animal's) trunk-a").
- In Finnish, it is ät-merkki, according to the national standardization institute SFS. Other names include kissanhäntä, ("cat's tail") and miukumauku ("the miaow sign").
- In Korean, it is golbaeng-i (골뱅이), a dialectal form of daseulgi (다슬기), a small freshwater snail with no tentacles.
- In Mandarin Chinese, it is xiao laoshu (小老鼠), meaning "tiny mouse", or laoshu hao (老鼠號, "mouse sign").
- In Polish, officially it is called atka, but commonly małpa (monkey) or małpka (little monkey).
- In Russian, sobachka (собачка) (little dog).
- In Slovenian, it is called afna (little monkey)
- In Swedish, it is called snabel-a ("proboscis-a"), or kanelbulle ("cinnamon roll")
- In Hungarian, it is called kukac (worm or maggot).
- In Czech, it is called zavináč (rolled pickled herring).
The commercial at corresponds to Unicode and ASCII character 64, or 0x0040.
References
