You use it every single day. You type it when you’re firing off an email to your boss or tagging a friend in a meme that’s only mildly funny. But honestly, if someone stopped you on the street and asked, "What is the official name for the at symbol?" you’d probably just blink at them.
It’s just "the at sign," right?
Well, yes. And no. It depends on whether you’re talking to a computer programmer, a 16th-century Italian merchant, or a hungry person in Prague. Most of us just call it the "at" because of its role in email addresses, but the history of this little curly "a" is surprisingly messy. It wasn't born in a Silicon Valley lab. In fact, it existed centuries before the first computer even had a power switch.
The Boring Official Answer: What Is the Name for the At Symbol?
If we’re being strictly technical—and a bit dull—the name for the at symbol in the Unicode Standard is "COMMERCIAL AT." That’s it. That’s the formal title it holds in the digital world’s universal character set (U+0040).
But nobody calls it that in real life.
In the world of typography and coding, you might hear it called the asperand, though that’s more of a "made-up" modern word that never quite caught on with the general public. Some people swear it should be called the "ampersat," a portmanteau of ampersand and at. It’s clever, sure, but try saying that at a dinner party and see how many people roll their eyes.
The most common, widely accepted name for the at symbol remains the at sign or at symbol. It’s functional. It’s literal. It describes exactly what the symbol does: it indicates a location or a rate.
Where Did This Thing Even Come From?
History is a bit of a mystery here. One popular theory, backed by researchers like Giorgio Stabile, a professor of the history of science at La Sapienza University, suggests the symbol originated as a shorthand for amphora.
Wait, what’s an amphora?
It’s an ancient clay jar used by Greeks and Romans to ship wine or grain. Stabile discovered a 1536 letter from a Florentine merchant named Francesco Lapi. In this letter, Lapi used the @ symbol to denote the price of one amphora of wine. It was a unit of measure. It represented a specific volume of liquid.
Think about that the next time you’re tagging someone on Instagram. You’re basically using a medieval wine bottle icon.
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Another camp of historians believes the symbol is a shortcut for the Latin word ad, which means "to" or "at." In the Middle Ages, monks who spent their days hand-copying manuscripts were always looking for ways to save time and ink. By looping the "d" around the "a," they created a ligature that was faster to write. It was the medieval version of "TL;DR."
Ray Tomlinson and the Email Revolution
For a few centuries, the symbol just sort of hung around the edges of commerce. It showed up on typewriter keyboards in the late 1800s because it was useful for accounting. A merchant might write "5 apples @ $0.10" to mean "five apples at ten cents each."
Then came 1971.
Ray Tomlinson, a computer engineer at BBN Technologies, was looking for a way to send messages between computers on the ARPANET (the internet's great-grandpa). He needed a character that wouldn't show up in anyone's name. He looked down at his Model 33 Teletype keyboard.
The @ was there. It was lonely. Nobody really used it.
Tomlinson decided the symbol would separate the user’s name from the name of the machine they were using. It made sense logically: "User at this computer."
It was a stroke of genius. He didn't invent the symbol, but he gave it a new soul. Because of Ray, the name for the at symbol became synonymous with our digital identities. Without him, we might be using a slash or a colon, which just feels... wrong.
What Do Other Countries Call It? (The Fun Part)
This is where things get weirdly poetic. While Americans and Brits are boring and just call it "at," the rest of the world looked at the symbol and saw animals or food.
In many languages, the name for the at symbol is a literal description of what it looks like.
- The Netherlands: They call it apenstaartje, which translates to "little monkey's tail."
- Italy: They see a snail. The name is chiocciola.
- France: Often called arobase, which comes from the Spanish "arroba," an old unit of weight.
- Germany: Sometimes they use Klammeraffe, meaning "spider monkey" or "clinging monkey."
- Israel: It’s a shablul, which is another word for snail.
- Czech Republic: My personal favorite. They call it zavináč, which is a "rollmop"—a pickled herring fillet rolled around a gherkin.
It’s fascinating that while we see a functional tool for communication, a Czech person looks at an email address and thinks of a sour fish snack.
Why "Asperand" Never Stuck
There have been several attempts to give the symbol a "cooler" name. In the 1980s and 90s, as the internet started to explode, some linguists felt "the at sign" was too clunky.
The word asperand was proposed. It sounds elegant, almost like an ampersand (&). However, language is democratic. People use what they want to use, and "asperand" sounded a bit too much like a pharmaceutical drug or a weird geometric shape.
Then there was strudel. In Israel, that’s actually a common slang name for it because of the pastry’s spiral shape. But even "strudel" remains a local quirk rather than a global standard.
The truth is, the name for the at symbol is whatever the majority of people decide it is. And right now, "at" is winning by a landslide.
The Technical Side: Coding and "The Whirl"
In the world of programming, symbols often have nicknames that differ from their "proper" names. If you’re reading code out loud to a colleague, you might call the @ symbol a whirl, a cyclone, or a snail.
In some older programming languages or documentation, you might see it referred to as a commercial at. In the Perl programming language, the @ symbol is used to denote an array. So, if a coder is looking at @numbers, they might just say "array numbers" or "at numbers."
It’s a versatile little guy. It’s a weight. A price. A location. A variable.
How to Explain It to Someone Else
Next time you’re in a trivia competition or just trying to look smart at a coffee shop, remember that the name for the at symbol is a moving target.
If you want the "Correct" (with a capital C) answer, go with Commercial At.
If you want to sound like a historian, talk about the Amphora or the Arroba.
If you want to be a tech nerd, call it the Asperand.
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And if you want to be the life of the party, tell them about the Pickled Herring.
Actionable Insights for Using the At Symbol
Even though we use it every day, there are some "best practices" for the @ symbol that most people ignore.
- Don’t over-tag. In professional settings (like Slack or Teams), using @channel or @here is the digital equivalent of screaming in a library. Use it sparingly.
- Security tip. Some people write their email as "name [at] domain.com" on public websites to stop bots from scraping their address. It actually works reasonably well, though modern bots are getting smarter.
- Social Media Etiquette. On platforms like X (formerly Twitter) or Instagram, putting a period before the at symbol (e.g., .@username) used to be a trick to make sure a reply showed up in everyone’s feed. Most algorithms have changed since then, so it’s mostly just a relic of the past now.
- Know your audience. If you're working with international clients, don't be surprised if they use their local term for it. Understanding that a "snail" or a "monkey tail" is just an @ sign can save you a very confusing five minutes of conversation.
The at symbol is one of the few characters that successfully made the jump from 16th-century ledger books to the cutting edge of social media. It survived the transition from quills to keyboards, and it’s likely not going anywhere. Whether you call it a rollmop, a snail, or just "at," it remains the backbone of how we find each other in the digital void.
To master your digital communication, pay attention to the symbols you use every day. Small details, like knowing the history of the at sign, can actually give you a better grasp of how language and technology evolve together. Start by looking at your keyboard—there's a whole lot of history hidden in those plastic keys.