At Sign

The at sign @ is also commonly called the at symbol, apetail or commercial at in English—and less commonly a wide range of other terms. The fact that there is no single word in English for the symbol has prompted some writers to use the French arobase or Spanish arroba—or to coin new words such as asperand, ampersat—but none of these has achieved wide currency.

Originally an accounting and commercial invoice abbreviation meaning "at the rate of" (e.g. 7 widgets @ $2 = $14), it was not included on the keyboard of the earliest commercially successful typewriters, but was on at least one 1889 model and the very successful Underwood models from the "Underwood No. 5" in 1900 onward. It is now universally included on computer keyboards.

In recent years, its meaning has grown to include the sense of being "located at" or "directed at", especially in email addresses and social media like Facebook and Twitter.

The mark is encoded at U+0040 @ commercial at (HTML: @).