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The at sign (@), the symbol that defines the internet in emails and social networks, emerged in 1345 in a Bulgarian text, became a tool for Italian merchants in 1536, survived on typewriter keyboards, and was saved from extinction in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, a Pentagon scientist who transformed it into the address of digital communication.
The most recognizable symbol of the internet was born at a time when electricity didn’t even exist. The at sign (@) that billions of people use daily to send emails, tag profiles on social networks, and create digital addresses has a history spanning at least seven centuries, connecting medieval scribes, Renaissance merchants, and American military engineering in an improbable arc that explains how an obscure character became an internet icon. The @ key was already present on typewriter keyboards 100 years ago, long before anyone imagined that computers would communicate with each other, and understanding why it survived from Bulgarian monasteries in 1345 to Pentagon laboratories in 1971 to reach the internet reveals one of the most curious stories in technology.
The at sign’s journey to the internet involved reinventions that almost made it disappear. Each era found a different use for the symbol: monks used it in religious texts, merchants adopted it in commercial transactions, typewriter manufacturers included it on keyboards for convenience, and when it seemed destined for oblivion, a programmer decided that strange character was exactly what the nascent internet needed. The survival of the @ is a story of adaptation that few symbols of human writing can tell.
The oldest record of the at sign before the internet: a religious text from 1345
The first known appearance of the @ has no relation to commerce or the internet, but to religion. In a Bulgarian translation of a Greek tale dated 1345, a scribe used the symbol to replace the letter A in the word Amen, writing something like “@men”. To this day, researchers have not found other texts from the same period that reproduce this use, making the record an isolated case that remains the greatest mystery in the trajectory of the symbol that centuries later would define the internet.
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The reason why the scribe made this substitution remains a subject of speculation. Some hypotheses suggest that the @ was already circulating as a stylistic abbreviation among medieval copyists who sought ways to speed up the manual reproduction of long texts, a common practice in an era where each page required hours of meticulous work with pen and ink. Regardless of the original motivation, the 1345 record establishes that the @ existed as a graphic resource long before any commercial or technological application, and that its journey to the internet began in a monastery, not an office.
How Italian merchants transformed the at sign into a commercial tool
The use that connects the @ to the business world was documented by historian Giorgio Stabile, from La Sapienza University in Italy. In research conducted in the 2000s, Stabile found a letter written by a Florentine merchant dated May 4, 1536, in which the symbol was used to indicate the price of goods sold, something like “a jar of olive oil @” followed by the charged value. The at sign functioned in this context as a price indicator per unit, a convention that merchants adopted to streamline commercial records, a function that would span centuries before transforming into the email marker that the internet uses today.
The linguistic explanation for the symbol’s format also dates back to this period. The @ would be an abbreviation of the Latin preposition “ad,” which means “in,” “to,” or “towards,” and the character’s design would represent the letter “a” encircled by the letter “d,” a graphic fusion that resulted in the circular shape we know today. This same commercial function of the at sign survived for over 300 years: in the 19th century, shopkeepers and sellers still used the @ on their typewriters in exactly the same way the Florentine merchant recorded in 1536, a continuity of use that ensured the symbol’s presence on keyboards that would eventually be connected to the internet.
The Pentagon scientist who saved the at sign from extinction and delivered it to the internet
In 1971, the @ was on the verge of oblivion. The commercial functions that justified its presence on keyboards had lost relevance, and the symbol was one of the least used characters in all written communication, a condition that paradoxically made it perfect for what Ray Tomlinson, a computer scientist working for the US Pentagon, needed to solve. Tomlinson was developing the software architecture that would become the first email program within the ARPANET project, a precursor to the internet, and needed a character to signal to the system that it was reading an electronic address.
The requirement was for a symbol that was distinguishable, rarely used in everyday communication, and absent from the programming codes of the time. “I was mainly looking for a symbol that wasn’t used much. And there weren’t many options,” Tomlinson explained in an interview with the Smithsonian, ruling out commas and exclamation points before finding the ideal solution in the @. The decision to use the at sign to separate the username from the server name (the user@server format that the entire internet adopts to this day) rescued a centuries-old symbol from irrelevance and transformed it into the most important character in digital communication. Without this choice, the @ would likely have disappeared from modern keyboards.
What the at sign is called around the world in the internet era
The universality of the @ on the internet did not prevent different cultures from finding their own names for the symbol. In Danish, some call it “snabel-a” (elephant’s trunk) or “grisehale” (pig’s tail). In French, the nickname is “escargot” (snail). In Russia, the symbol is known as “sobachka” (little dog). Each name reflects the visual interpretation that different cultures make of the at sign’s circular shape, and the variety of nicknames demonstrates that even on the globalized internet, where the @ performs an identical function in all countries, the perception of the symbol remains culturally diverse.
The list of creative names continues in other languages. In Afrikaans, the @ is called “aapstert” (monkey’s tail). In Hebrew, it can be called “shtrudl” (strudel, the rolled pastry). In Thailand, some people describe the symbol as “ai tua yiukyiu,” an expression that means something like “the character that wiggles like a worm.” The diversity of visual interpretations of the same character is a linguistic phenomenon that would probably amuse both the medieval scribes who invented it and the American scientist who rescued it for the internet, neither of whom imagined that the @ would inspire comparisons to animals, sweets, and mollusks in dozens of languages.
What the at sign represents for the history of the internet and communication
The trajectory of the @ is proof that symbols can survive entire eras when they find new utility. The at sign transitioned from a monastic abbreviation to a commercial marker, from a forgotten key on typewriters to a fundamental icon of the internet, and each transition happened because someone realized that character solved a specific problem of its time. Monks needed to speed up copies, merchants needed to record prices, and Tomlinson needed a symbol that the nascent internet could use without conflict with other functions.
The history of the at sign also demonstrates that innovation does not always require invention. Tomlinson did not create the @: he found a symbol that had existed for centuries and gave it a new purpose that transformed human communication forever. The internet as we know it depends on this character to function, and every time someone types an email address or tags a profile on a social network, they are using a tool that medieval monks, Renaissance merchants, and a Pentagon scientist shaped over nearly 700 years of history.
And you, did you know that the @ existed centuries before the internet? Which name for the symbol in other languages caught your attention the most? Leave your opinion in the comments.
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