I must say, I love the way th@ this tread is going. F@ chance we’ll ever find the true right answer, but we went to the m@ trying!
With God as my witness, I thought turkey’s could fly.
My TTY has no At Sign on the keyboard. Haven’t seen one with it either. But if I call someone using a computer & they type one, it shows up on the screen.
I agree with the consensus here that @ stands for ‘at.’
But that begs another question: Why did anyone feel the need to abbreviate a two-letter word? And why * that * word? Seems like abbreviations on your typewriter or keyboard for ‘and’ and ‘the’ would make more sense.
“You should tell the truth, expose the lies and live in the moment.” - Bill Hicks
Laosiest! HAH!
My boy, that may be the single most appalling sentence to appear on this board in months. If Groucho was alive today he’d horsewhip you…if he had a horse.
Congratulations. “o"o====”
JB
Lex Non Favet Delicatorum Votis
Well, of course there is a symbol for ‘and’, the ampersand (&). But why is it presently considered inappropriate for anything other than use in the names of businesses.
The solution to abbreviating ‘the’ is to dispense with it completely. Russian doesn’t need it. . .well, at least, it usually gets away without expressing anything equivalent.
But to answer the question of why one would ever choose to abbreviate a two-letter word – you would figure that the merchants who did it simply decided to cross their 't’s at the time they had already gone on to their next price tag. Instead of crossing a ‘t’ in a form something like a cross, they just thought it would be quick and cute to loop the “cross” around the ‘a’ of ‘at’. Try it in warp time. Ah, the first stage in their evolution to a dot.com.
Maybe the English merchants were losing out in sales in competition with the French à and Spanish a, because of the time it took to make that ‘t’ on ‘at’, complete with its cross. Not sure how the Germans made out with für(?). 
Ray (Well, if you don’t know. . .tell 'em what sounds good. . .or bad, as the case may warrant.)
“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” – Steven Weinberg, Physicist
In INTERCAL, the @ is “whirlpool”.
Disclaimer and proof of sanity:
I have not actually written any code in INTERCAL.
If you wanna know what a symbol is called by various hackers of the world, the Jargon file is the place to look. For example, in the entry for ASCII they give this entry:
<dl>
<dt>@
<dd>Common: at sign; at; strudel. Rare: each; vortex; whorl; [whirlpool]; cyclone; snail; ape; cat; rose; cabbage; <commercial at>.
</dl>
@ was developed by the dress-making industry, which stole the concept obviously from the Americans, since the circular part goes counter-clockwise…
The circle part goes clockwise in the southern hemisphere. Activate your Aussie keyboard if you don’t believe me.
Had a conversation on this very topic not too long ago with friends.
We never did find the answer to the name for @, but # is called an oct-something. Octote? Octetal? Something like that…so @ has to have a name too, no?
Did you not see my post just a few inches above your own?
If you want to see what the name for ‘#’ is, follow the <font size=7 color=red>LINK</font>
<font size=1>The password is octothorpe.</font>
“Octothorpe” is a made-up word that no longer survives except as an urban legend.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
I didn’t really check into the etymology, I was just irritated that someone could look right past my statement
which included links to the very thing to look up the answers, and then muse about “octo something?”
My apologies, sandyr, I should not have jumped down your throat so hard. The word you were looking for I believe is octothorpe, though as John W. points out it (along with many other computer geek terms for things) is a made up word roughly meaning eight-pointed thing or something similar.
Okay, for what it’s worth: read this. it pretty much completely verifies the story about the octothorpe that I heard many years ago. I did a google search and came up with 358 references. Didn’t check many of them but the term does (did?) seem to be common in the telephone biz.
Oops. That was in reference to the origin of the word octothorpe, I probably should have said that somewhere …
I got the octo-whatever from a column from The Washington Post’s Style section called The Red Pencil (don’t know how to put in links, go find it yourself). Octothorpe was NOT the answer, else i’d have mentioned it.
Well, I found a link to the current edition of The Red Pencil, the column to which sandyr refers. Unfortunately, after much searching I did not discover anything about the # sign. I searched for “pound sign”, “pound symbol”, “pound”, “#”, “octo” and “octothorpe” and found nothing there. Can you help out with a general date you saw this?
I crawled through far too many google search pages looking for this and the only thing I found was the aforementioned octothorpe. I’m really curious about it now, but I am losing energy to keep wading through acres of search pages. Any additional info on the column you saw, like if you remember a word or turn of phrase that was used, would be helpful.
Found it! Sorta.
Using the archive search> feature at the Washington Post, I was able to find this:
Unfortunately, you have to pay to get the article, $1.50 during off-peak times.
sandyr, if you promise me the word is in this article and is not octothorpe, I’ll buy the article. Or, if I can get through to my library to see if they have this paper I might stop by.
Erg 
July?
Can’t remember what I had for breakfast Tuesday, let alone what I read in July. And, of course, the more I think about it the more I think I may be wrong. Or right 
Will saying I’m 99.99% positive it was NOT octothorpe do?
Personally, the # thing isn’t bothering me nearly as much as the @ thing, but hey, if you think the answer is worth a buck and a half, go for it 
When it’s all over do ya think we’d get credit from Redgate for telling him he’s wrong? If he WAS wrong, that is