Fun Facts Archive

The History Of The '@' Symbol

The actual history of the symbol is murky and ambiguous with no single reliable source. A common interpretation is that it has evolved from the Latin word 'ad' meaning 'to, toward, at'. Cursive writing has seen the upright of the 'd' curve to the left until it wraps all the way around while the lower part of it merged with the 'a' until the two characters were indistinguishable from each other.

While this is a nice theory there is little proof behind it. What is more certain is the recent interpretation of 'at the price of' which the symbol adopted in northern Europe over the last several hundred years. It was used in this way for accounting and invoices to give the units of price such as "1/2 gallon of ale @ 3d a gallon".

It was in late 1971 when a chap called Ray Tomlinson sent the first network email. In this system he made it possible to identify email from remote computers by specifying the user was at another host, hence the '@' symbol made its logical way into email addresses. Prior to this it was only possible to send email to other users on the same computer.

Written by Gareth Williams on Jun 23rd 2005.

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