COMMERCIAL AT

About this character

The at sign (@), formally the commercial at, is a punctuation mark historically derived from the medieval scribal abbreviation for Latin *ad* (“to” or “at”). It first flourished in commercial ledgers to denote unit prices, as in “12 apples @ $1.” Its modern ubiquity began with Ray Tomlinson’s 1971 choice of @ for email addresses, separating user from host, and later expanded to social media handles and mentions. In programming, @ marks annotations, decorators, and array or attribute syntax in languages such as Python, Java, and Perl. Typographically, it remains a single versatile glyph for location, address, and interaction.

Copy formats

Character

Copy the literal character when you need the glyph itself:@