In 2010, Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), made a bold choice. "I wanted to have an exhibition of objects that shows everybody can have a museum-quality exhibition in their drawer. It includes the Post-it Note, M&Ms, the paper clip, the OXO Good Grips [a popular series of kitchen tools], objects that are so embedded in our lives and work so well that we don't even notice them anymore," she says.
"Part of what a museum does, especially when you isolate these objects, is to create distance and drama, and let people look at that with different eyes," Antonelli says. "All of a sudden, you're stunned by the story that's behind them. You realise it's a whole universe." As she rounded out the exhibit, it felt like an obvious decision. Antonelli acquired the @ sign for MoMA's permanent collection.
Stop for a minute and gaze across the hills and valleys of your keyboard. If you set aside the symbols for currency, there is perhaps no character that holds more cultural weight than @. It's the plumbing of the internet. It ties your email together. It highlights your username in a wall of text. Chances are you used it today.
But &, #, %, *, these are all useful and ubiquitous marks. How did the @ sign get its power? It may seem like a distinctly modern phenomenon, yet buried in the curls of this decorated little "a" is a story that goes back thousands of years, bridging national, cultural and linguistic barriers as it twisted its way across the pages of human history.
"It's an abbreviation," says Keith Houston, author of the book Shady Characters: The Secret History of Punctuation. The only question is what it originally stood for. One thing is clear: there's a connection to pottery.
The ancient Greeks were fond of a style of clay pot called an amphora. You've seen them – tall and shapely with two handles and a long neck. Amphoras were used to store wine, grains, olive oil and more, a practice that continued in the Mediterranean and beyond for centuries. As time went on, an amphora became a standard unit of measure.
"Merchants had to communicate the idea that 'I'm going to sell you a certain number of amphoras of something or other at a particular price' quite a lot," Houston says. And eventually, people started drawing an "a" with a long tail wrapped around it and skipping the rest of the letters.
On 4 May 1536, a merchant named Francesco Lapi wrote a letter going from Seville to Rome, where he said that an amphora of wine was worth around 70 or 80 ducats, using an @ for amphora. That's the first example we've found of @ used in the modern sense, but it's not the oldest copy of the symbol. You can find an @ in the pages of a 1375 Bulgarian manuscript, but it has no discernible meaning – it's just a flourish on the first letter in the word "amen".
After hundreds of years, amphoras fell out of usage, but the @ stuck around as accountants and record keepers used it to denote how much things were selling for.
"The root of this is in typewriters, which really spread in the United States, primarily, in the 19th Century," says Gerry Leonidas, a professor of typography at the University of Reading in the UK. In part, that's because of the explosion of mail order catalogues in the US, he says, which created massive administrative needs and eventually an entire class of professional typists.
"The typewriter is essentially a way to minimise the risk of people's bad handwriting and increase the efficiency and predictability of office administration," Leonidas says. Typewriters were so complex and expensive that some early models didn't even have ones and zeros – you just typed the letters "O" and "I" instead – but by the late 1800s, @ was important enough to include. "And because typewriters are tied into business and accounting processes, the @ survives across all different generations of typewriters, exactly because it fulfils this critical role."
When computers got keyboards, @ came with them. If you weren't an accountant, though, it wasn't particularly useful. That changed thanks to Ray Tomlinson, a computer scientist working at Arpanet, the US government project that laid the foundation for the internet. He had the idea that people might want to send each other messages. As Tomlinson wrote out the code, he needed a way to indicate where a particular person sat in the network. Looking at the keyboard, there it was. He plucked @ out from the world of business jargon and stuck it in the middle of the address, and in 1971, he sent the first email.
As the internet burst out of the US and dominated human culture over the next half century, the @ rode with it. But as the symbol spread across the globe, a curious thing happened. It started getting new names.
Today, Italians call the @ sign "chiocciola", or "snail". You can see the resemblance. In Hebrew it's sometimes "strudel". In Czech it's "zavináč", meaning "rollmops", the name for pickled herring wrapped in a cylinder, usually around a savoury filling. Russians sometimes call it "sobaka", meaning "dog", and it does look like a pet curled up to sleep, at least if you squint. That's led to a long history of cutesy jokes. If you learn to speak Russian, and someone tells you "write me at the doggy", you'll know what they mean.
"These days everybody just calls it 'at'. A lot of things have been anglicised over the last 25 years," says Nick Fransen, a freelance management consultant from Belgium, where you might grow up speaking Flemish (sometimes called Belgian Dutch), French or German, depending on where you live. "But a few days ago, I was speaking to an older person who was very unanglicised, and I just reverted back to calling it 'apenstaartje' without even thinking about it," he says. Apenstaartje, the traditional Dutch name for @, means "monkey's tail".
It’s just "at" in English, though sometimes it's referred to as the "commercial at", due to its business connection.
"The reason it doesn't have any special name in English is because it's fairly clear, early definition gets carried across," Leonidas says. "But as people begin to adapt these symbols into local languages, they need a way to remember them. Somebody hands you a computer, and you look at it, and you describe what it looks like as opposed to looking up what the name is. In Greek we call it 'little duckling'."
But just as Tomlinson adopted this curly symbol for his own work, the @ continues to be reinterpreted for other purposes. In Spain and Portugal, the word for @ is "arroba", a term related to amphora that is also a standard unit of weight and measure. But today, @ is sometimes used as a gender-neutral character in Spanish, in place of the letter "O" which is used for the masculine forms of words, and "A" which is used for the feminine. When writing the words for "friends", you might type "amig@s" to be more inclusive.
"There's something very interesting about 'at' though, which I think is unique. It's what happens after the symbol," Leonidas says.
When you write your name, you use capital letters and there's a space between your first and last name. "The @ however, as a handle, forces both a unicase rendering of names and the complete elimination of any spaces," he says. "We have to invent a unique, single word for ourselves. It forces us to think about how we present our identity."
Research demonstrates something you've probably experienced: on some level, choosing a username can be an emotionally charged process. Typically, people don't just want their handles to be unique, people want them to feel right, to represent them, to look and feel good and express something about their personality or identity. Usernames are harnessed to express who we are, or to create an online persona separate from their real-world identity. Linguists who study online culture have found usernames are so tied to our sense of self that changing them can be strangely intimate, almost like changing your name or your appearance offline. And on most parts of the internet, @ is inseparable from your online identity.
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Of course we have strong feelings about @, Leonidas says. It's tied to your understanding of your own being.
MoMA's exhibition Pirouette: Turning Points in Design offers an alternative setting from your keyboard to appreciate the @ sign, thousands of years after its roots in ancient Greek ceramics.
"We have been trained, at this point, to understand how movies are made, or to think about how a piece of music is written. But we haven’t been trained to do that with objects," MoMA's Antonelli says. "What I want to really convey about the @ is the delight, the eureka moment, the sense of happiness and pride of being part of the designed world that I got when I realised how much was in that little belly button of a symbol."
The @ sign is currently on display at Pirouette: Turning Points in Design at MoMA in New York until 15 November 2025.
* Thomas Germain is a senior technology journalist for the BBC. He's covered AI, privacy and the furthest reaches of internet culture for the better part of a decade. You can find him on X and TikTok @thomasgermain.
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