Did You Know? The 'At' Symbol (@) Has an Ancient, Unexpected History!

Did you know that the ‘at’ symbol, that little ‘@’ you use every single day for emails and social media, is actually way, way older than the internet—or even electricity? It’s true! Its origins are pretty wild and span centuries.

One of the earliest known uses dates back to a 1536 letter by an Italian merchant who used it to denote ‘anfora’ (amphora), which was a measure of liquid capacity. So, it basically meant ‘at the price of X per amphora.’ Think of it like a shorthand for ’each’ or ‘per.’ Later, scribes and printers used it in various ways across different languages, sometimes representing ‘at’ in English, or even ’each’ in Spanish and Portuguese. It just kind of floated around in the typographic ether for hundreds of years, an interesting but not particularly central character.

Then, in 1971, when programmer Ray Tomlinson was figuring out how to send messages between computers on ARPANET (the internet’s precursor), he needed a clear way to separate the user’s name from their machine’s address. He looked at the keyboard, saw the ‘@’ symbol, and thought, ‘Hey, that’s not used in names, and it means ‘at’!’ And just like that, this ancient merchant’s shorthand got a brand new, incredibly important job, becoming the iconic symbol of our digital age. Pretty neat, right? It’s amazing how something so commonplace today has such a long and winding story!