Welcome to the Grammar Minute, where we’re saving the English language sixty seconds at a time! I’m Lauren Smyth, and I’m back with another weird history of punctuation marks. Yesterday, we talked about the ampersand. Now it’s time for the @ symbol.
Nobody has any idea where this thing came from. It’s at least eight hundred years old and, at the time of its first use, obviously had nothing to do with Instagram handles or email addresses. The earliest known text containing this symbol used it to replace a capital “A” in the word “Amen,” but … nobody knows why. In various languages, the symbol was used rather frequently and referred to units of weight or volume or a short form of “on the day of” or an abbreviated word or … really just a whole lot of things that seemed related to the letter A and needed to be written quickly. Until recently, it probably didn’t have much to do with the word “at.”
In the 1970s, a computer engineer set up an email system using the @ sign, and the rest is history. He later joked that he probably single-handedly saved the @ symbol from going the way of the “cent” sign on computer keyboards.
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