There is a small symbol that you have certainly been using on a daily basis for twenty years, but you have probably never asked yourself about its meaning and origin; it is the at sign (@).
Democratized thanks to its use in the semantics of email addresses, the at sign is nevertheless a symbol that has existed for many years.
Its origin remains unclear, but the word at has been used since the Middle Ages in the Iberian Peninsula to signify a unit of measurement, while the symbol and its modern meaning has been used since the Renaissance by merchants.
But here again, the original meaning of the @ remains vague and several explanations exist:
- as the abbreviation of the word at sign, the Iberian unit of measurement
- as a replacement for the preposition "to" in Spain and Italy
- as equivalent to the preposition " at » in English, to designate the unit price of goods
- as equivalent to the Latin word " ad » which means “at, towards, at, near…”
It is therefore difficult to determine the real origin of this symbol, but perhaps it is a mix of all these explanations.
When in 1971 the computer scientist Ray Tomlinson sent the first electronic message in history between two machines, he decided to use the @ symbol because it was not used in any alphabet.
Finally, today and rewriting history, it is a mixture of the 2nd and 4th explanation that seems to be imposed on everyone! Indeed, the at sign of our email addresses translates to "at" in English which could mean "to" or "to the address of", a bit like the Latin word "ad".
And this is justified rather well since your email is composed of a name and a domain. Thus, byothe@byothe.fr is therefore the email of byothe in the domain "byothe.fr".
Article updated on January 24, 2021 by Byothe
