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: about; ampersat or asperand (compare ampersand); amphora; ape; arobase; atgry; cabbage; cat; cinnabun or cinnamon bun; commercial symbol; cyclone; each; mercantile symbol; rose; schnable; scroll or scroll-a; snail; strudel; these; vortex; whirlpool; or whorl. Some of these are based on specialized usage, others are visual descriptions, and atgry (plural atgrynge) is a recurring joke proposed on Usenet as the answer to a longstanding linguistic riddle [1].

Modern uses

The symbol's most familiar modern use is in e-mail addresses (sent by SMTP), as in jdoe@example.com ("the user named jdoe working at the computer named example in the com domain"). Ray Tomlinson is credited with the introduction of this use in 1972.

In the programming language Perl, the symbol prefixes variables which contain arrays, as opposed to scalar values (indicated with '$') and hash tables / associative arrays ('%'). If the code were to be treated as a sentence, this prefix would be the equivalent of a determiner, so "@animals" might be read as "these animals".

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. However no document showing this usage has been presented.

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 an @ of wine in Peru. The symbol is still called arroba in Spanish and it represents 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, Portugal and Brazil, it denotes a weight of about 25 pounds. The weight and the symbol are called arroba. (In Brazil, cattle is still priced by the arroba -- now rounded to 15 kg)
• The French name is arobas ou arabesque (from the Spanish weight measure) or a commercial, and sometimes escargot ("snail"). More names include queue de singe (monkey-tail) and a dans le rond (a in the circle).
• In Esperanto, it is called ĉe-signo ("at"), po-signo ("each" -- refers only to the mathematical use) or heliko ("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 Lithuanian, it is eta (equivalent to english at but with Lithuanian ending)
• 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 Romanian, it is Coadă de maimuţă (monkey-tail) or "a-rond"
• In Russian, sobaka (собака) (dog) or lĭaguška (лягушка) (frog).
• In Swedish, it is called snabel-a ("(elephant's) trunk-a")
• In Slovenian, it is called afna (little monkey)
• In Hungarian, it is called kukac (worm or maggot).
• In Czech and Slovak, it is called zavináč (rolled pickled herring).
• In Norwegian, it is officially called krøllalfa ("curly alpha" or "alpha twirl"). (The alternate alfakrøll is also common.)
• In Catalan it is called arrova or ensaïmada, the roll brioche tipical from Majorca.
• In Japanese it is called "at mark" (アットマーク) a combination of English words, known as wasei-eigo.
• In Turkish it is at (using the English pronunciation).
• In Greek it called παπάκι (small duck).

The commercial at corresponds to Unicode and ASCII character 64, or 0x0040.

References

This article is based on material taken from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing prior to 1 November 2008 and incorporated under the "relicensing" terms of the GFDL, version 1.3 or later.

External links

• A Natural History of the @ Sign: Names in various language
• Linguist's view
• Article about the history of @ Contains more names in other languages