According to an article reprinted here the “@” symbol appeared as early as May 4 1536 in letters by Italian merchants.
It is said to represent an amphora.
Comments on this origin theory? Also, do you pronounce it as “ampersat”?
picmr
I pronounce it “at.”
There is a discussion of the atmark at http://www.ozemail.com.au/~burnside/Odds.htm
The author apparently isn’t too familiar with the internet, if he thinks that what follows the “@” sign is the server name.
But email addresses do take the form user@servername. Some don’t explicitly name the machine because they have a default, but you can specify it…
An ampersand is this thingie, “&”, above the number 7.
Duck:
I assume that someone named the “@” symbol (which I’ve called the “at” sign) the “ampersat” by analogy with the ampersand ("&").
Incidentally, the rigin of the ampersand bothered me for a long time – what was it supposed to be? A weird G or S or a G Clef?
Then one day it hit me. I was working with photocopies of old (circa 1700) documents and I noticed that all the “&” were rotated almost ninety degrees from the way it appears in this message.
I remember when I was a kid and my mother taught me how to make the symbol for “and”. It was basically a “+” sign, but made without lifting your pencil from the paper. You draw a strong downward vertical stroke, then at the bottom you reverse and go up, making a circling motion to the left to make the horizontal crossbar. In other words, you do “|” followed by “-”, but you don’t lift your pencil between he two.
If you don’t go straight up when you start the circling around, but you go towards the left, your “cross with a loop” broadens into what looks like “&” on its back. Try it. You’ll see.
On the other hand, I have no idea where “@” comes from. “Amphora” sounds unlikely, but I don’t have anything else to offer.
Anyone ever read Alfred Bester’s book “The Demolished Man”? (It won the first Hugo award ever for best sf novel.) In that he has names spelled with “&” and “@” symbols, so “Atkinson” and “Wugand” become “@kinson” and “Wyg&”
The ampersand symbol comes from old Latin shorthand. It is originally the Latin word Et. In some old-fashioned cursive hands and typefaces you can see the E and the *t[/]i] clearly. In the conventional & they’ve sort of merged.
Ampersand comes from the phrase “and per se and” – in other words, “and (the symbol &) by itself means ‘and’.”
Ishmitingas:
I’ll have to look that up. I admittedly haven’t researched this.
But I have to say that the ampersands I’ve seen in eighteenth century documents look MUCH more like stylized “+” signs that run-together “Et” abbreviations.
They talked about this on NPR last night. You can listen to it here http://search.npr.org/cf/cmn/cmnpd01fm.cfm?PrgDate=07/31/2000&PrgID=2
We previously discussed this with limited success.
I personally like this thread because it was about the only time I could one-up Dr. Fidelius.
Thanks for the link douglips. I searched for Cecil, but it gave me everything, then the boards and was told “please enter a word”.
A name for the “at squiggle” is useful in verbal communication, just as ampersand is useful to distinguish between and and &. I reckon “ampersat” would be obvious to akll who heard it. Thus I claim…
picmr
“at sign”.
The French call it “arrobas” or “a commercial”.
In Esperanto, it’s the “che-signo”.