At sign

The at sign, @, is an accounting and invoice abbreviation meaning "at a rate of" (e.g. 7 widgets @ £2 per widget = £14),^[1] now seen more widely in email addresses and social media platform handles. It is normally read aloud as "at" and is also commonly called the at symbol, commercial at, or address sign.

The absence of a single English word for the symbol has prompted some writers to use the French arobase,^[2] Occitan arròba and Aragonese, Catalan, Portuguese and Spanish arroba, or to coin new words such as ampersat^[3] and asperand,^[4] or the (visual) onomatopoeia strudel,^[5] but none of these have achieved wide use.

Although not included on the keyboard of the earliest commercially successful typewriters, it was on at least one 1889 model^[6] and the very successful Underwood models from the "Underwood No. 5" in 1900 onward. It started to be used in email addresses in the 1970s, and is now routinely included on most types of computer keyboards.