June 1, 2026 • 9 mins
The @ sign goes by many names today, but it's only so commonplace because of medieval merchants and one 1970s programmer. Learn more about the at sign (or arroba, Klammeraffe, strudel, grisehale, or gül) in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://people.howstuffworks.com/arroba.htm
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogelbaum. Here in English, we call it the AT symbol,
you know, the lowercase A encased in a curl that
we put in email addresses and social media handles. We
are linguistically dull on this count. In Germany it's called
(00:25):
a clamorophe, meaning spider monkey. In Israel it's called a strudle,
after the rolled pastry. In Hungary it's a kutz a,
meaning worm. In Norway it's a hallay meaning pigstail, and
in Turkey it's called the gull meaning rose. Apologies, by
the way for my pronunciation on all of those. I
(00:46):
did make an effort. At any rate, we English speakers
obviously missed an opportunity to play on the fun curly
cue shape of the AT sign. But if we're interested
in the long and fascinating history of this now ubiquitous symbol,
it's better to call it by its Spanish name, arooba.
(01:07):
If you traveled with Spanish speaking country today and visit
the local food market, you might come across a different
usage of the aeroba that predates email addresses by half
a millennium. In Ecuador or Bolivia, for example, a large
quantity of potatoes is often sold by the arooba, with
one aroba equalling a little less than a bushel, which
(01:29):
is about sixty pounds or twenty seven kilos. It's not
a set measure across goods. An aroba of oil is
about three gallons or eleven liters, and an arooba of
wine is about four gallons or fifteen liters. But okay,
what's the connection between adoba the weight and measure, and
aeroba the symbol on your keyboard. The Greeks and Romans
(01:53):
used to trade commodities like wine, oil, and olives stored
in long necked ceramic jars called m foi. For these
ancient Mediterranean merchants, an emphora was not only a convenient
storage vessel, but a standard measurement. One amphora equalled a
volume of one cubic foot, which is roughly seven gallons
(02:14):
or twenty six and a half liters. Later, Spanish and
Portuguese traders used a similar method to set a standard
weight and volume for casks of different commodities. They didn't
use the word amphora, but rather aroba, a which they
borrowed from the Arabic speaking Muslims who ruled the Iberian
Peninsula from seven to eleven CE to fourteen ninety two CE.
(02:38):
The Arabic al rub means one fourth, and an aoba
in medieval span and Portugal was a quarter of a quintal,
a quintal being another historical unit of measurement that means
one hundred units of weight for whatever system different people
were using before metric kilos and imperial pounds became standard,
(02:58):
So we had the words that indicated measurements. Where does
the AT sign come in? No one actually knew until
the year two thousand. That's when one Giorgio's Tabile, a
professor of the history of science at Lasapienza University in Rome,
stumbled on a letter dating from fifteen thirty six that
(03:18):
appears to use the AT sign as shorthand for Mphori.
The author of the letter, an Italian trader was reporting
on the price of an emphora of wine in Seville,
but instead of writing out the word amphora, the merchant
used the AT symbol. Stabile told the Guardian at the time,
(03:39):
until now, no one knew that the AT sign derived
from this symbol, which was developed by Italian traders in
a mercantile script they created between the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance. The loop around the A is typical of
that merchant script. When Stabilee looked at Spanish Latin dictionaries
from the fifteen hundreds, he found that Adoba was synonymous
(04:01):
with Amphora, so it's very likely that Spanish traders would
have adopted the same AT symbol to stand for Adoba,
making the Spanish name for the AT sign one of
the oldest and truest that we have. In more modern usage,
the AT symbol became shorthand for at the rate of
(04:22):
a factory ordering supplies my invoice for one hundred tons
of steel wire at fifty dollars a ton, for example,
or a neighborhood grosser would advertise a daily special for
brought worst at thirty cents a pound. Even though the
symbol was widely used in business and commerce by the
eighteen hundreds, it wasn't included in the earliest mechanical typewriters.
(04:45):
The first commercially successful typewriter, which happened to be the
first with a querity keyboard, was patented in eighteen sixty
eight by three American inventors. This shoals and glidin typewriter
had just thirty keys and no shift function, so it
only had space for four punctuation marks, a comma, period, dash,
(05:07):
and semicolon. It also only had capital letters and didn't
even have keys for the digits zero and one, requiring
typists to substitute the letters I and O in their place.
Just like the dollar sign. The business friendly AT symbol
made its way onto typewriter keyboards by the end of
the eighteen hundreds, but it would take another fifty years
(05:31):
for the AT symbol to be invited to the nascent
computing party. The AT sign was included in the group
of letters, numerals, and special characters that early IBM computers
could represent, including punched card systems in the nineteen fifties
and in nineteen sixty one, IBM's room sized Stretch supercomputer,
(05:53):
the fastest computer of its day. However, there's a chance
the AT sign would still be an obscure keyboard character
if not for the actions of an engineer by the
name of Ray Tomlinson. Back in nineteen seventy one. Tomlinson
was working for a private defense contractor helping the US
government's advanced research projects agency build what would become the
(06:16):
world's first remote computer networks, known as arpinnet. Tomlinson's job
was to write programs that would run on this new network,
connecting a whopping nineteen different machines in nineteen seventy one.
Electronic mail already existed in a primitive form at the time.
Messages could be saved by a user and opened up
(06:39):
later by a different user on the same machine. But Tomlinson,
as a side project, wanted to see if messages could
be sent from one machine to another over arpinnet. There
was a problem, though, how would Tomlinson direct messages to
different users on a single remote computer. He needed a
symbol that would serve as the marker of a name
(07:01):
and address. Looking down at his teletype terminal, Tomlinson saw
the humble AT symbol sitting atop the letter P. Tomlinson
chose the AT symbol for a number of practical reasons.
A First, it was already common shorthand for at the
rate of so it made sense as user at host computer. Second,
(07:24):
it was obscure enough that it wasn't already being used
in any of the existing names of host computers, nor
was it being used as a command in his company's
programming system. Tomlinson wrote up the experimental email program and
sent a test message to himself at a nearby terminal
from his brand new email address, Tomlinson at BBN DASH tenxa,
(07:48):
a BBN DASH tenxa being the type of computer system
he was working on. So what did the world's first
email say? Tomlinson has zero recollection, but guesses it was
something momentous like testing one, two, three four or quarity
you we up. It's no what hath God wrought? Which
(08:10):
was the first American long distance telegraph message, but it's
perhaps appropriate for something that we use so casually today.
Today's episode is based on the article call It Attoba,
cook Cuts or Strudle The history of the app sign
on HowStuffWorks dot Com, written by Dave Ruse. For lots more,
(08:32):
check out the book Shady Characters, The Secret Life, Punctuation
Symbols and other typographical marks written by Keith Houston. Brain
Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot
Com and is produced by Tyler Klain. Four more podcasts
from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogelbaum. Here in English, we call it the AT symbol,
you know, the lowercase A encased in a curl that
we put in email addresses and social media handles. We
are linguistically dull on this count. In Germany it's called
(00:25):
a clamorophe, meaning spider monkey. In Israel it's called a strudle,
after the rolled pastry. In Hungary it's a kutz a,
meaning worm. In Norway it's a hallay meaning pigstail, and
in Turkey it's called the gull meaning rose. Apologies, by
the way for my pronunciation on all of those. I
(00:46):
did make an effort. At any rate, we English speakers
obviously missed an opportunity to play on the fun curly
cue shape of the AT sign. But if we're interested
in the long and fascinating history of this now ubiquitous symbol,
it's better to call it by its Spanish name, arooba.
(01:07):
If you traveled with Spanish speaking country today and visit
the local food market, you might come across a different
usage of the aeroba that predates email addresses by half
a millennium. In Ecuador or Bolivia, for example, a large
quantity of potatoes is often sold by the arooba, with
one aroba equalling a little less than a bushel, which
(01:29):
is about sixty pounds or twenty seven kilos. It's not
a set measure across goods. An aroba of oil is
about three gallons or eleven liters, and an arooba of
wine is about four gallons or fifteen liters. But okay,
what's the connection between adoba the weight and measure, and
aeroba the symbol on your keyboard. The Greeks and Romans
(01:53):
used to trade commodities like wine, oil, and olives stored
in long necked ceramic jars called m foi. For these
ancient Mediterranean merchants, an emphora was not only a convenient
storage vessel, but a standard measurement. One amphora equalled a
volume of one cubic foot, which is roughly seven gallons
(02:14):
or twenty six and a half liters. Later, Spanish and
Portuguese traders used a similar method to set a standard
weight and volume for casks of different commodities. They didn't
use the word amphora, but rather aroba, a which they
borrowed from the Arabic speaking Muslims who ruled the Iberian
Peninsula from seven to eleven CE to fourteen ninety two CE.
(02:38):
The Arabic al rub means one fourth, and an aoba
in medieval span and Portugal was a quarter of a quintal,
a quintal being another historical unit of measurement that means
one hundred units of weight for whatever system different people
were using before metric kilos and imperial pounds became standard,
(02:58):
So we had the words that indicated measurements. Where does
the AT sign come in? No one actually knew until
the year two thousand. That's when one Giorgio's Tabile, a
professor of the history of science at Lasapienza University in Rome,
stumbled on a letter dating from fifteen thirty six that
(03:18):
appears to use the AT sign as shorthand for Mphori.
The author of the letter, an Italian trader was reporting
on the price of an emphora of wine in Seville,
but instead of writing out the word amphora, the merchant
used the AT symbol. Stabile told the Guardian at the time,
(03:39):
until now, no one knew that the AT sign derived
from this symbol, which was developed by Italian traders in
a mercantile script they created between the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance. The loop around the A is typical of
that merchant script. When Stabilee looked at Spanish Latin dictionaries
from the fifteen hundreds, he found that Adoba was synonymous
(04:01):
with Amphora, so it's very likely that Spanish traders would
have adopted the same AT symbol to stand for Adoba,
making the Spanish name for the AT sign one of
the oldest and truest that we have. In more modern usage,
the AT symbol became shorthand for at the rate of
(04:22):
a factory ordering supplies my invoice for one hundred tons
of steel wire at fifty dollars a ton, for example,
or a neighborhood grosser would advertise a daily special for
brought worst at thirty cents a pound. Even though the
symbol was widely used in business and commerce by the
eighteen hundreds, it wasn't included in the earliest mechanical typewriters.
(04:45):
The first commercially successful typewriter, which happened to be the
first with a querity keyboard, was patented in eighteen sixty
eight by three American inventors. This shoals and glidin typewriter
had just thirty keys and no shift function, so it
only had space for four punctuation marks, a comma, period, dash,
(05:07):
and semicolon. It also only had capital letters and didn't
even have keys for the digits zero and one, requiring
typists to substitute the letters I and O in their place.
Just like the dollar sign. The business friendly AT symbol
made its way onto typewriter keyboards by the end of
the eighteen hundreds, but it would take another fifty years
(05:31):
for the AT symbol to be invited to the nascent
computing party. The AT sign was included in the group
of letters, numerals, and special characters that early IBM computers
could represent, including punched card systems in the nineteen fifties
and in nineteen sixty one, IBM's room sized Stretch supercomputer,
(05:53):
the fastest computer of its day. However, there's a chance
the AT sign would still be an obscure keyboard character
if not for the actions of an engineer by the
name of Ray Tomlinson. Back in nineteen seventy one. Tomlinson
was working for a private defense contractor helping the US
government's advanced research projects agency build what would become the
(06:16):
world's first remote computer networks, known as arpinnet. Tomlinson's job
was to write programs that would run on this new network,
connecting a whopping nineteen different machines in nineteen seventy one.
Electronic mail already existed in a primitive form at the time.
Messages could be saved by a user and opened up
(06:39):
later by a different user on the same machine. But Tomlinson,
as a side project, wanted to see if messages could
be sent from one machine to another over arpinnet. There
was a problem, though, how would Tomlinson direct messages to
different users on a single remote computer. He needed a
symbol that would serve as the marker of a name
(07:01):
and address. Looking down at his teletype terminal, Tomlinson saw
the humble AT symbol sitting atop the letter P. Tomlinson
chose the AT symbol for a number of practical reasons.
A First, it was already common shorthand for at the
rate of so it made sense as user at host computer. Second,
(07:24):
it was obscure enough that it wasn't already being used
in any of the existing names of host computers, nor
was it being used as a command in his company's
programming system. Tomlinson wrote up the experimental email program and
sent a test message to himself at a nearby terminal
from his brand new email address, Tomlinson at BBN DASH tenxa,
(07:48):
a BBN DASH tenxa being the type of computer system
he was working on. So what did the world's first
email say? Tomlinson has zero recollection, but guesses it was
something momentous like testing one, two, three four or quarity
you we up. It's no what hath God wrought? Which
(08:10):
was the first American long distance telegraph message, but it's
perhaps appropriate for something that we use so casually today.
Today's episode is based on the article call It Attoba,
cook Cuts or Strudle The history of the app sign
on HowStuffWorks dot Com, written by Dave Ruse. For lots more,
(08:32):
check out the book Shady Characters, The Secret Life, Punctuation
Symbols and other typographical marks written by Keith Houston. Brain
Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot
Com and is produced by Tyler Klain. Four more podcasts
from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
BrainStuff News
Host
Lauren Vogelbaum
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