At sign (@)

How to read it

Unicode names the character COMMERCIAL AT (U+0040) and gives “at sign” as its other name. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it by its two jobs today: in an email address it separates “the username from the domain name”, and on social networking platforms it goes before a username “to direct a message or comment toward that user”. Ray Tomlinson, who chose it for email, read an address as “user ‘at’ host” and called @ “the only preposition on the keyboard”. On social media it is often confused with the hash sign: @ points a post at a person, while # tags a topic.

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What @ is called in other languages

Many languages name @ after an animal. MoMA lists them: Germans, Poles and South Africans call it a “monkey’s tail” in their own languages, Italians and the French see a snail, Chinese speakers a little mouse and Russians a dog. In Finnish it is miukumauku, “the sign of the meow”, for a curled-up sleeping cat. In Spanish it is the arroba, the name of an old unit of weight, which Unicode’s chart gives as an alternative name for the character.

@ in Spanish words

MoMA notes that @ has begun to express gender neutrality in Spanish, written inside words as in “Hola l@s viej@s amig@s y l@s nuev@s amig@s” (hello old friends and new friends).

Look-alikes

Unicode cross-refers @ to ⓐ (U+24D0), a small letter a in a circle, which is a separate character.