Commercial at

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Disambiguation: Not to be confused with commercial art.

A commercial at, @, also called an at symbol, an at sign, or just at, is a symbolic abbreviation for the word at. Its formal name comes from its commercial use in invoices, as in, "7 widgets @ £2 ea. = £14". It is also known as strudel, and, rarely, each, vortex, and whorl, and INTERCAL: whirlpool, cyclone, snail, ape, cat, rose, cabbage, amphora.

Its most familiar use today is in e-mail addresses: e.g., jdoe@widget.com. It is ironic that @ has become a trendy mark of the Internet since it is a very old symbol, derived from the Latin preposition "ad" (at). Giorgio Stabile, a professor of history in Rome, has traced the symbol back to the Italian Renaissance in a Roman mercantile document signed by Francesco Lapi on May 4, 1536.

"Commercial at" in other languages:

• In Dutch, it is called apenstaartje ("little monkey-tail").
• The French name is arobase and sometimes escargot.
• In Spain and Portugal, it denotes a weight of about 25 pounds. The weight and the symbol are called arroba.
• In Israeli Modern hebrew, it is known as 'shtrudl' ("Strudel").
• Italians call it chiocciola ("snail").
• In German, it is Klammeraffe, meaning "clinging monkey."
• In Danish, it is either grishale ("pig's tail") or snabel-a ("(animal's) trunk-a").
• In Finnish, it is ät-merkki, according to the national standardization institute SFS.
• In Mandarin Chinese, it is xiao laoshu (小老鼠), meaning "tiny mouse", or laoshu hao (老鼠號, "mouse sign").
• In Polish, małpka (little monkey).
• In Russian, sobachka (собачка) (little dog).
• In Slovenian, it is called afna (little monkey)
• In Swedish, it is called snabel-a, or kanelbulle ("cinnamon roll")

The commercial at corresponds to Unicode and ASCII character 64, or 0x0040.

This article (or an earlier version of it) contains material from FOLDOC, used with permission.

External links

• A Natural History of the @ Sign: Names in various language
• Linguist's view
• German work