Commercial at




<character> "@".

ASCII code 64.

Common names: at sign, at, strudel.

Rare: each, vortex, whorl, INTERCAL: whirlpool, cyclone, snail, ape, cat, rose, cabbage, amphora.

ITU-T: commercial at.

The @ sign is used in an electronic mail address to separate the local part from the hostname.

This dates back to July 1972 when Ray Tomlinson was designing the first[?] e-mail program.

It is ironic that @ has become a trendy mark of Internet awareness 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 1536-05-04.

In Dutch it is called "apestaartje" (little ape-tail), in German "affenschwanz" (ape tail).

The French name is "arobase".

In Spain and Portugal it denotes a weight of about 25 pounds, the weight and the symbol are called "arroba". Italians call it "chiocciola" (snail).

See @-party.



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American Standard Code for Information Interchange
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Commercial Internet eXchange
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