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Proper name for ' at' symbol
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Is there a proper name for the ' @ ' symbol in the way that star is called an asterisk?
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generally it's known as "commercial at" but it depends on the language (for example one of the Dutch names for it is "apeklootje" which means "little monkey's testicle"
More here:
http://www.herodios.com/herron_tc/atsign.html
I was always told it was called an 'ampasand'(sp.?) and it derived from the days of accounts ledgers, where clerks were writing long lists of prices - 'Item' at 'cost' and because of the speed at which they wrote, the 'at' eventually became a single stoke - @ and found its niche with the arrival of the Internet.
Monday, August 7, 2000 Article
500-year history of Net�s special sign By Philip Willan
THE ubiquitous symbol of the Internet era communications, the @ sign used in email addresses, is actually a 500-year-old invention of Italian merchants, an Italian academic has revealed.
Giorgio Stabile, a professor of the history of science at La Sapienza University, Rome, claims to have stumbled on the earliest known example of the symbol�s use, as an indication of a measure of weight or volume.
He said the @ sign represented an amphora, a measure of capacity based on the terracotta jars used to transport grain and liquid in the ancient Mediterranean world. The first known instance of its use, he said, occurred in a letter written by a Florentine merchant on May 4, 1536.
Sent from Seville to Rome by a trader called Francesco Lapi, the document describes the arrival in Spain of three ships bearing treasure from Latin America.
"There, an amphora of wine, which is 1/13th of a barrel, is worth 70 or 80 ducats," Lapi said, representing the amphora with the now familiar symbol of an "a" wrapped in its own tail.
The Spanish word for the @ sign, arroba, also indicates a weight or measure, which was equivalent, at the end of the 16th century, to 11.3kg (25 lb) or 27.2 litres (six gallons).
"The loop around the �a� is typical of that merchant script." The professor unearthed the ancient symbol in the course of research for a visual history of the 20th century, to be published by the Treccani Encyclopedia.
He said the sign, known to modern Italian cybernauts as la chiocciola (the snail).
500-year history of Net�s special sign By Philip Willan
THE ubiquitous symbol of the Internet era communications, the @ sign used in email addresses, is actually a 500-year-old invention of Italian merchants, an Italian academic has revealed.
Giorgio Stabile, a professor of the history of science at La Sapienza University, Rome, claims to have stumbled on the earliest known example of the symbol�s use, as an indication of a measure of weight or volume.
He said the @ sign represented an amphora, a measure of capacity based on the terracotta jars used to transport grain and liquid in the ancient Mediterranean world. The first known instance of its use, he said, occurred in a letter written by a Florentine merchant on May 4, 1536.
Sent from Seville to Rome by a trader called Francesco Lapi, the document describes the arrival in Spain of three ships bearing treasure from Latin America.
"There, an amphora of wine, which is 1/13th of a barrel, is worth 70 or 80 ducats," Lapi said, representing the amphora with the now familiar symbol of an "a" wrapped in its own tail.
The Spanish word for the @ sign, arroba, also indicates a weight or measure, which was equivalent, at the end of the 16th century, to 11.3kg (25 lb) or 27.2 litres (six gallons).
"The loop around the �a� is typical of that merchant script." The professor unearthed the ancient symbol in the course of research for a visual history of the 20th century, to be published by the Treccani Encyclopedia.
He said the sign, known to modern Italian cybernauts as la chiocciola (the snail).
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