@
At sign
Joins user to domain in every email address and prefixes handles on social platforms. In code it marks decorators in Python, at-rules in CSS (@media), and scoped packages in npm. Being ASCII it renders identically everywhere; its only real hazard is keyboard placement, which varies wildly between national layouts (often behind AltGr).
Biography
merchant ledgersCenturies of ledger duty before email: attested in merchant correspondence — a 1536 Florentine letter uses it for amphorae, a trade measure — and in Iberian records for the arroba unit. When Ray Tomlinson needed a separator for the first email addresses in 1971, he picked it precisely because it sat on the keyboard yet appeared in no names.
also known asarrobacommercial at
Copy it anywhere
- Symbol
@ - Unicode
U+0040 - HTML entity
@ - CSS content
\0040 - JavaScript
\u0040 - URL encoded
%40 - Windows Alt code
Alt+64