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Its inclusion on keyboards was intermittent until the late 20th century, when it became a more standard character in computing following its inclusion in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). The @ shape has been noted in documents dated as early as the 14th century. But, because its meaning in those documents bears no evident connection to the sign’s later commercial use, the similarity in form of the a-based symbol may simply be coincidental. These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'at.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. You’ll simply need to pick a wireless plan, find a new device (or bring your own), gather a few pieces of information about your account, and we’ll get you up and running on the AT&T network.
At sign
An at sign (@) is a symbol that is commonly used before the email domain name in email addresses. This symbol may also be used to informally substitute for the word at and is often used for a specific reason on social media. The at sign is used in email addresses and typically separates a username from a domain name in an email address. For example, the email address is hosted by Google through their Gmail email service and belongs to someone using the username sendspamhere.
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Although not included on the keyboard of the earliest commercially successful typewriters, it was on at least one 1889 model[6] and the very successful Underwood models from the "Underwood No. 5" in 1900 onward. It started to be used in email addresses in the 1970s, and is now routinely included on most types of computer keyboards. All content on this website, including dictionary, thesaurus, literature, geography, and other reference data is for informational purposes only. This information should not be considered complete, up to date, and is not intended to be used in place of a visit, consultation, or advice of a legal, medical, or any other professional. I read an interesting article about plastic surgery in a magazine when I was at the hairdresser’s. The following examples show some instances where an at sign might be used.
When do you use an at sign?
Twitter, a microblogging platform that was launched in 2006, embraced the phenomenon and in 2007 began embedding hyperlinks to user profiles and collecting tweets directed at them on a dedicated page. Other social networks followed suit, introducing similar features, and the @ sign soon became a standard tool to facilitate online interactions. Both have a one-time charge, automatically expire after 30 days, and provide coverage on over 175 qualifying cruise ships when at sea (PDF, 390KB).
Because there is no other efficient way to write an email address, the at sign might be used in formal writing when mentioning a person’s email address. This practice is so common on social media that the at sign is sometimes used as a slang verb to mean “to tag someone in a social media post.” For example, a person who posts A hot dog is not a sandwich. On social media is jokingly saying that they don’t want anyone to mention them (or tag them) in a reply or response to this “controversial” post.
In informal writing, such as texting or on social media, the at sign may be used to represent the word at and would be read aloud as such. For example, the sentence I won $100 @ the casino would be read as I won $100 at the casino. This usage would not be considered acceptable in formal writing and should be avoided. A common contemporary use of @ is in email addresses (using the SMTP system), as in (the user jdoe located at the domain example.com).
In fact, the very earliest records that contain @ or similar shapes did not use them to represent a preposition. The first known use of the symbol in its traditional commercial sense is in a 1536 Spanish-language letter from a Florentine merchant. It stood for a unit of volume, arroba (“quadrantal”; from Arabic al-rubʿ, “one-fourth”), which represented the capacity of a standard amphora, a vessel used to store and transport liquids, cereals, and other goods. This use of the symbol was so widespread in Mediterranean trade that it is still called arroba in Spanish and Portuguese today. The at sign is a typographical symbol (not a punctuation mark) and has one usage in which it may appear in formal writing.
This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. On web pages, organizations often obscure the email addresses of their members or employees by omitting the @. This practice, known as address munging, makes the email addresses less vulnerable to spam programs that scan the internet for them.
In British English, you say that someone is at school or at university when you want to say that they study there. Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
However, it does have several common uses online and in informal writing. While that email doesn’t look especially reliable, it does offer an example of how the at sign is most commonly used. Although the at sign is most often used in email addresses, it does have a few other uses that you might come across, especially if you find yourself on social media. Pay-per-use rates apply if you don’t purchase an AT&T CruiseSM package, when your package expires, or if your ship is not included. The earliest yet discovered symbol in this shape is found in a Bulgarian translation of a Greek chronicle written by Constantinos Manasses in 1345. Held today in the Vatican Apostolic Library, it features the @ symbol in place of the capital letter alpha "Α" as an initial in the word Amen; however, the reason behind it being used in this context is still unknown.
The adoption of the @ symbol for electronic communication began, predictably but incidentally, with the invention of email in 1971. When Ray Tomlinson was fiddling with code that would allow users to send messages across ARPANET, the experimental network that preceded the Internet, he needed a marker to separate the name of the user from that of the host terminal. He settled on @, one of the least utilized characters in ASCII, which was unlikely to appear in user or computer names and had little potential for causing confusion in the command lines of the operating system.
The symbol has long been used to represent the various meanings of the Latin ad, whether directional (“to”) or spatial/temporal (“at”). Several theories posit its original conception as a sort of ligature combining the letter “a” with another character or diacritic. The classicist Berthold Ullman suggested it represents the Latin ad itself, combining a with an uncial d (ꝺ), although he never expounded on the evidence for this conjecture. Others have pointed to the symbol’s historical usage in French writing to represent à (“to,” “at”; derived from Latin ad), but there are no indications that the sign first developed as a combination of a with a grave accent (`). It was absent from the first typewriter, invented in 1867, and first appeared on a typewriter in 1885.
On many social platforms, using the at sign before a person’s username allows someone to “tag” another person when posting content. Depending on the platform, doing this may cause that person to receive an alert or notification that they have been mentioned by another user. #friendship includes a tag to the user named PBandJames1234 in hopes that they will see the message or the message will direct others to that person’s social media account. With the dawn of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, the general public rapidly discovered uses for the sign apart from email addresses. In interacting with groups of people in online message boards, chat rooms, and social media, Internet users found the at sign useful for clarifying “at” which users their messages were directed.
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