A Brief History of @

Baldwin Louie — Mon, 07 May 2001 15:00:00 -0700

The @ sign appears to be one of the few survivors of the dot-com shakeout. It's part of the electronic identity of hundreds of millions of Internet users, and dozens of companies have tried to hijack it - together with the values of modernity, connectedness and speed that it embodies - by embedding it into their names. But usage of the @ sign to replace or "enhance" current words is also spreading. "CU 8.30 PM @ Bruno's," reads a typical message sent through a mobile phone. In Spain, the @ sign is increasingly used by youngsters as a politically correct way of avoiding specifying gender: "Hola, amig@s!"

The man who first put the @ sign into the structure of e-mail addresses was Ray Tomlinson, a computer engineer who in 1971 performed what he calls "a quick hack" and sent the first electronic message - to himself. Why did he pick the sign? "I scanned the keyboard for a sign that wouldn't appear on anyone's name, and couldn't therefore create any confusion."

But how did the @ sign end up on the computer keyboard in the first place?

Linguists are divided. Some think it originated in the early Middle Ages, when monks laboring over manuscripts contracted the versatile Latin word "ad" - which can mean "at" or "towards" or "by" - into a single character. Most linguists, however, say that the @ sign is a more recent invention, appearing sometime during the 18th century as a commercial symbol indicating price per unit, as in "5 apples @ 10 pence." Yet another linguist, researcher Denis Muzerelle, says the sign is the result of a different twist, when the accent over the word "&#224" used by French and German merchants was hastily extended.

But last July an Italian researcher discovered some 14th-century Venetian commercial documents clearly marked by the @ sign, where it was used to represent a gauge of quantity, the "anfora," or jar. Giorgio Stabile also found a Latin-Spanish dictionary dating from 1492 where "anfora" is translated into "arroba," a measure of weight. It's therefore natural that, in 1885 the "commercial a" was included on the keyboard of the first model of Underwood typewriter and from there migrated into the standard set of computing characters (such as ASCII) 80 years later.

The biggest problem with the @ sign nowadays is what to call it. Spaniards and Portuguese still use "arroba" -- which the French have borrowed and turned into "arobase." Americans and Britons call it the "at-sign." So do the Germans ("at-Zeichen"), Estonians ("&#228t-m&#228rk") and Japanese ("atto maak").

However, in most languages the sign is described using a wide spectrum of metaphors lifted from daily life. References to animals are the most common. Germans, Dutch, Finns, Hungarians, Poles and South Africans see it as a monkey tail.

The snail - oddly enough for the anti-snail-mail set - portrays the @ sign not only in French ("petit escargot") and Italian ("chiocciola"), but also in Korean and Esperanto ("heliko"). Danes and Swedes call it "snabel-a" - the "a" with an elephant's trunk; Hungarians a worm; Norwegians a pig's tail; Chinese a little mouse; and Russians a dog.

Food offers other tantalizing metaphors. Swedes have borrowed the cinnamon bun ("kanelbulle"). Czechs have been inspired by the rolled pickled herring ("zavinac") commonly eaten in Prague's pubs. Spaniards sometimes call it "ensaimada," which is a sort of sweet, spiral-shaped bagel typically made in Majorca. Hebrew speakers use "shtrudl" (or "strudel"), as in the well-known roll-shaped pastry.

My favorite, though, is the Finnish "miukumauku" - the "sign of the meow"- inspired by a curled-up, sleeping cat.

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A Brief History of @