1971: The @ Symbol: From Medieval Monks to Email Addresses

Every email address in the world contains it. It’s the character that separates who you are from where your messages live. The @ symbol is so synonymous with email that in many languages, the word for @ literally translates to something like “the email sign.” But the symbol’s history stretches back centuries before anyone imagined electronic communication — through Renaissance commerce, medieval monasteries, and possibly even ancient Rome.

The Ancient Origins

The exact origin of the @ symbol is a matter of scholarly debate, with competing theories and fragmented evidence. The most widely cited academic theory comes from Italian professor Giorgio Stabile, who in 2000 discovered what he claimed was the earliest known use of the @ symbol in a letter written by a Florentine merchant named Francesco Lapi in 1536. Lapi used @ as an abbreviation for “amphora” — a unit of measurement based on the large clay jars used in Mediterranean trade.

But some historians push the origin further back. There is a theory that medieval monks, tediously copying manuscripts by hand, invented @ as a ligature — a combination of two letters joined together — for the Latin word “ad,” meaning “at” or “toward.” In the scribal tradition, such shortcuts were common. The letter “d” would be written with its ascender curving up and around the “a,” eventually evolving into the circular @ we know today.

This monastic theory is harder to prove definitively, as few manuscripts with clear @ usage have been reliably dated. But the concept of scribes creating shorthand symbols for common words is well-documented, and the evolution from “ad” to @ is linguistically plausible.

The Commercial Symbol

What is well-established is that by the 18th and 19th centuries, @ had become a standard commercial symbol meaning “at the rate of.” Merchants and bookkeepers used it in ledgers and invoices: “12 widgets @ $3 each” meant twelve widgets at three dollars apiece. The symbol was so common in commerce that when typewriters were designed in the 1880s, @ was included on the keyboard as a standard character.

This is a crucial detail. The @ symbol survived into the computer age not because of its medieval origins or linguistic elegance but because of its commercial utility. Typewriter keyboards included it. When computer keyboards were designed based on typewriter layouts, @ came along for the ride. By the 1960s, every computer keyboard had an @ key, even though most programmers had no particular use for it.

The symbol sat there, available but underused, waiting for someone to find a new purpose for it.

Ray Tomlinson’s Choice

In late 1971, Ray Tomlinson, an engineer at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), was working on a way to send messages between users on different computers on ARPANET, the precursor to the internet. He needed a syntax that would specify both the user and the computer they were on. He needed a separator character — something that would sit between the username and the host name and wouldn’t be confused with characters that might appear in either.

Tomlinson looked at his keyboard — a Model 33 Teletype — and considered the available characters. He needed something that wouldn’t appear in anyone’s name, wasn’t commonly used in computing commands, and ideally had some intuitive meaning. The @ symbol was perfect. It meant “at” in common usage, it wasn’t used in any programming language or operating system command he knew of, and it was sitting right there on the keyboard.

He chose @, and the email address format was born: user@host. The first email sent using this convention went from one computer to another sitting side by side in Tomlinson’s office. He later said he couldn’t remember what the message said — probably something like “QWERTYUIOP” — but the format stuck permanently.

Why It Was Brilliant

Tomlinson’s choice of @ was more elegant than he probably realized at the time. The symbol’s meaning in English — “at” — created email addresses that read like natural language. “tomlinson@bbn” meant “Tomlinson at BBN.” This readability made email addresses intuitive in a way that arbitrary separators (imagine if email addresses used “user#host” or “user%host”) would not have been.

The symbol also had the practical advantage of being unique. The period, hyphen, and underscore were already used in filenames and computing conventions. The comma and semicolon had meanings in programming. The ampersand, asterisk, and exclamation point had various uses in different systems. The @ was genuinely unused — a character with no existing role in computing, free to be repurposed.

As email spread from ARPANET to universities to businesses to the general public, the @ symbol spread with it. Today, it appears in approximately 4 billion email addresses worldwide.

The Cultural Explosion

The @ symbol’s association with email transformed it from an obscure commercial character into one of the most recognized symbols in the world. In 2010, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York added the @ symbol to its permanent architecture and design collection — not a physical artifact but the character itself as a design object.

Different languages adopted wildly different names for the symbol, each reflecting a different interpretation of its visual shape. The Germans see a spider monkey (Klammeraffe). The Italians see a snail (chiocciola). The Dutch see a monkey’s tail (apenstaartje). The Danes see an elephant’s trunk (snabel-a). Finns call it “miukumauku” — the meow sign. The Czech call it “zavinac” — a rolled pickled herring.

These names reveal something charming: nobody had a standard word for this symbol before email made it ubiquitous. Each language looked at the curling shape and saw something different from its own culture.

The Symbol Today

The @ symbol has transcended email to become a general-purpose “digital address” indicator. Twitter (now X) adopted it for usernames. Instagram, Slack, Discord, and countless other platforms use @ for mentions and handles. In casual writing, @ has become shorthand for “at” in any context.

But email remains its primary domain. The @ is the defining character of the email address format — the one symbol that immediately tells you “this is an email address.” Ray Tomlinson, who passed away in 2016, chose it for practical reasons: it was available, it was intuitive, and it was on the keyboard. Half a century later, it’s one of the most consequential typographical decisions in history.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why is the @ symbol used in email addresses?

Ray Tomlinson chose the @ symbol in 1971 when creating the first network email system because it was the only preposition on the keyboard. It naturally read as 'user AT host' — indicating a person at a specific computer. The symbol was also rarely used in computing at the time, reducing the risk of confusion with existing commands or text.

How old is the @ symbol?

The @ symbol is at least 500 years old and possibly older. The earliest confirmed use dates to a 1536 letter by an Italian merchant. Some historians believe medieval monks used it as an abbreviation for the Latin word 'ad' (meaning 'at' or 'toward') as early as the 6th or 7th century. It was used commercially for centuries to mean 'at the rate of' in bookkeeping.

What is the @ symbol called in other languages?

Different languages have wonderfully creative names for @. In German it's 'Klammeraffe' (spider monkey). In Italian, 'chiocciola' (snail). In Dutch, 'apenstaartje' (little monkey tail). In Hungarian, 'kukac' (worm). In Danish, 'snabel-a' (elephant trunk A). In Hebrew, 'strudel' (after the pastry). The variety of names reflects the symbol's visual ambiguity.