Modern Grammar: The @ Sign, Where Where Is Who

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The @ sign, or @ symbol, is pronounced and sometimes written as “at.” It’s also sometimes called the commercial at or ampersat. It’s a “monkey tail” in Dutch, a “strudel” in Israel, and a “snail” in Italian. Like a lot of well-designed images associated with the internet, no one knows quite who came up with it.

Some theories claim it evolved from the Latin ad or the French à, both of which roughly mean “at,” or that the spiral around the a represents a lower-case e, since its original usage was more like “each at.”  

We believe monks were the first to use it, but the first record of its use was in trade, on May 4, 1535. Florentine merchant Francesco Lapi used it as shorthand for “amphoras,” containers of wine. Before long, though, other Italian merchants were using it to denote things like weight or pricing—with modern symbols, @ 20 lbs. would be each (weighing in) at twenty pounds, @ $20 would be each (priced) at twenty dollars.

Over the next few centuries, the at sign remained a useful but somewhat obscure business shorthand. We know it now as “that symbol you get when you press shift-2,” but older typewriters often didn’t include it at all. It might have slipped into obsolescence if not for the internet age. And yet its obscurity was why it proved useful.

In the 1970s, Ray Tomlinson was at work (@work?) on what would become email: he developed a system where networked computers could “talk” to each other through a teletype machine. Any such network needs a way to identify the computers involved, just as we need phone numbers so we’re directing our calls to our friends or the pizza palace, not just calling up some rando. The identifier also serves as a form of Caller ID, so you know who’s trying to contact you. (How did we not think Caller ID was an essential part of phone service for so long? I couldn’t tell you.)

Computer programs at the time were already using most of the symbols they had available, but no one was using the @ for much. Plus, its association with the word “at” meant it was appropriate for physical locations. And virtual ones.

So Tomlinson started using @ to identify the computer that sent a message and the one that received it. This evolved from using single, physical computers as “addresses” to the virtual addresses one could only create when many computers were networked.

And that’s why my email address ends in @gmail.com today.

Thanks to that precedent, you’d also use the @ sign to precede usernames in many systems—Xwitter, Discord, some collaborative blogs—when you want the owner of the username to know you’re using their name. It can have the force of a summons: if you know they’re using the system, you know they’ll probably see you invoking their name sooner or later. Just be careful with “@beetlejuice.”

It has special uses in Substack too—text that follows it when I’m composing an article provokes a search of Substack’s database. This means that while most “Modern Grammar” pieces were drafted in Substack, I’ve had to compose this article in Microsoft Word, just so Substack’s interface didn’t annoy the hell out of me every time I plonked down another “@.”

Today, for most of us, the at is more tied to our online identities than even to virtual spaces, much less to physical ones. “Where we are at” online has become a big part of who we are. And some days, that makes me wish Francesco Lapi’s @mphroras of wine were right here, dropped off @ my doorstep.