what does @ mean?

Question

on the keyboard there is the sign @ how was this derived

Answer 1

"The at sign (@, read aloud in English as "at") is a typographic symbol most commonly used as an abbreviation in accounting and commercial invoices, in statements such as "7 widgets @ $2 ea. = $14". More recently, the at symbol has become ubiquitous due to its use in email addresses.
It is often referred to informally as the at symbol, the at sign, the ampersat, the commat, the obelix, or just at. In Israel the At symbol is often referred to as a "strudel," in Dutch, a "apestaart," in italian a "chiocciola." Sometimes it is called a monkey because it looks like a monkey with its tail wrapped around it.It has the official name commercial at in the ANSI/CCITT/Unicode character encoding standards."

Answer 2

The actual origin of the symbol is uncertain. It was used by monks making copies of books before the invention of the printing press. Since every word had to be painstakingly transcribed by hand for each copy of a book, the monks that performed the copying duties looked for ways to reduce the number of individual strokes per word for common words. So, the word at became a single stroke of the pen as @ instead of three strokes. While it doesn't seem like much today, it made a huge difference to the men who spent their lives copying manuscripts!
Another origin tale states that the @ symbol was used as an abbreviation for the word amphora, which was the unit of measurement used to determine the amount held by the large terra cotta jars that were used to ship grain, spices and wine. Giorgio Stabile, an Italian scholar, discovered this use of the @ symbol in a letter written in 1536 by a Florentine trader named Francesco Lapi. It seems likely that some industrious trader saw the @ symbol in a book transcribed by monks using the symbol and appropriated it for use as the amphora abbreviation. This would also explain why it became common to use the symbol in relation to quantities of something.

Answer 3

It is not known which particular word gave rise to the modern at sign.

Theories include:

In the Middle Ages, used by monks to shorten the Latin word ad which means "at, toward, or by."
In the 1400s for the Spanish unit of weight arroba = "jar".
From the Latin preposition ad, which means about with numerals. However, no document showing this usage has been presented.
An abbreviation of the Greek preposition ανά (ana), which means 'at the rate of' when used with numerals, exactly its modern commercial usage.
Giorgio Stabile, a professor of history in Rome, claims to have traced the @ symbol back to the Italian Renaissance in a Venetian mercantile document signed by Francesco Lapi on May 4, 1537. The document talks about commerces with Pizarro and in particular the price of an @ of wine in Peru, where @ stood for amphora (Italian anfora; Spanish and Portuguese arroba). The word arroba still means both the at symbol and a unit of weight (see below). Under this view, the symbol was used to represent one amphora, which was a unit of weight or volume based upon the capacity of the standard terra cotta jar, and came into use with the modern meaning "at the rate of" in northern Europe.
It could be the abbreviation of any word beginning in a, and more than one such symbol was likely in use, but there is no continuous record between any of the possibilities and the modern symbol.

One theory of the evolution of the at signFrom Norman French "à" meaning "at" in the sense of "each". "2 widgets à £5.50 = £11.00" is the sort of accountancy shorthand notation you will see on English commercial vouchers and ledgers all the way into the 1990s, where the usage was superseded for accountants with its email usage. It is used in this way in Modern French also. According to this view, the at symbol is simply a stylish way of writing the à, so as not to remove the hand from the page in making the symbol. You can see hybrids between @ and à in French handwriting in street markets to this day.
The @ was present on the Lambert, a single element typewriter manufactured in 1902 by Lambert Typewriter Company of New York. Its inclusion in the original 1963 ASCII character set seems to have been unremarkable, so it was probably a standard character on commercial typewriters by that time

Answer 4

This is the "at" symbol, most commonly used today in email addresses to separate an identity prefix (the person being contacted) from a location suffix (the organisation "at" which the person may be contacted). I believe it derives from shorthand notation, originally from accounting and commercial documentation.

Answer 5

at. It is left over from the typewriter keyboard that Harvey Intel used in his first computer back in 1955. If you don't like it you can just pry it off and not use it, as it has been deprecated by ICANN this year.

Answer 6

at, don't know the history though
oh wait found something, check out the web site for more info
The "@" symbol. . .
used by grocers and accountants throughout the English-speaking world to indicate a rate, or cost per unit, as in "10 gal @ $3.95/gal" [ten gallons at three dollars and ninety-five cents per gallon] has become the de facto delimiter in e-mail addresses, separating the user's name from the domain name.

Answer 7

may b someone played n the word AT and wrote it this way then people started 2 use it n their computers as an easy symbol 2 use.

Answer 8

The longest name for "@" is "commercial at sign"; the first and last words may each be omitted.
The official ANSI/CCITT name is "commercial at".

Answer 9

before th evloution of utf..during the time of ascii...and beining r mainframes...

peoiple wanted to reperesent data id's...which will be stable.effiecnt and dynamic...

of ex...
a filename ex01 is denoted as ex$ where$ value keep changing...

now...the scientist want more such standard variable..

hence they utilised available know popular key words.. like #@%

Answer 10

It is at sign. U use this to distinguish the e-mail addresses. For more
www.en.wikipedia.org
www.whatis.com
www.howstuffworks.com