On your keyboard it sits quietly, tucked away between the letters and numbers — a curled little character that most of us tap without thinking. The @ sign. In English it’s simply “at.” In Taiwan it’s a “little mouse.” In Dutch, a “monkey’s tail.” In Russia, it’s a “dog.” Italians see a “snail,” and in Hebrew, it’s a “strudel.”
A symbol that looks so modern, almost inseparable from the internet age, is in fact one of humanity’s oldest survivors of language and trade. Its roots stretch back thousands of years, beginning not with email, but with wine, reveals Thomas Germain on BBC.
From clay pots to curly letters
The story begins with the amphora, a tall, two-handled clay vessel beloved by the ancient Greeks. Amphoras held olive oil, grains, and, most famously, wine. They were so common that an amphora itself became a unit of measure. Merchants needed shorthand to record transactions — a way to note “three amphoras of wine” without writing the whole word.
Somewhere along the Mediterranean’s trade routes, scribes began drawing a stylised “a,” its tail looping protectively around the letter — the ancestor of our @.
We can still see it in action: in 1536, an Italian merchant, Francesco Lapi, wrote from Seville to Rome, pricing wine at 70 or 80 ducats “@ amphora.” That is the earliest surviving modern use of the @ sign.
But the design is older still. A 14th-century Bulgarian manuscript already shows the symbol curled around the first letter of “amen.” Decorative then, practical later, it slowly wound its way into the ledgers of accountants and traders across Europe.
Typewriters, typists, and the age of office work
By the 19th century, @ had a secure home in bookkeeping. When typewriters took over business offices in America, manufacturers made sure to include it on the keyboard. Early machines were expensive, complicated — so complex that some didn’t bother with the number one or zero (typists simply used “I” and “O”). But @ survived the cull.
The boom of mail-order catalogues and the rise of clerical workers meant that @, once a scribble in a merchant’s notebook, became a staple of industrial-era business. It was a quiet survivor, waiting for its renaissance.
The spark: Ray Tomlinson and the first email
That renaissance came in 1971. Ray Tomlinson, a computer scientist working on Arpanet — the US government project that seeded today’s internet — needed a way to separate a user’s name from the computer they used.
Looking down at his keyboard, his eyes landed on @. It wasn’t commonly used outside accounting, and crucially, it wasn’t part of anyone’s name. It was perfect. Tomlinson plucked the curly symbol out of obscurity, slid it into the middle of addresses, and sent the very first email.
From that moment, @ was reborn as the plumbing of the internet.
A symbol with a thousand names
As the internet spread, people around the world reinvented @ through their own languages and imaginations. Italians saw a snail. The Dutch a monkey’s tail. Czechs compared it to rolled herring. Russians thought it looked like a curled-up dog.
Each name is a little cultural window. As Belgian consultant Nick Fransen recalls: “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.”
In English, by contrast, the symbol remained practical and literal: just “at.”
The sign of online identity
Today, @ isn’t just part of email addresses. It shapes how we present ourselves online. It forces us into a single, unbroken username — no spaces, no titles, no hierarchy of capital letters.
That little spiral has become inseparable from identity. Choosing a handle can feel as intimate as changing your name. It expresses who you are, or who you want to be. As Gerry Leonidas, a professor of typography at the University of Reading, notes: “Of course we have strong feelings about @. It’s tied to your understanding of your own being.”
From MoMA to your keyboard
In 2010, Paola Antonelli, senior curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, made a radical decision: to acquire the @ sign for MoMA’s permanent collection. She placed it alongside Post-it Notes, M&Ms, and the paper clip — humble designs that work so seamlessly we barely notice them.
“Part of what a museum does,” she says, “is to create distance and drama, and let people look at objects with different eyes. All of a sudden, you’re stunned by the story that’s behind them.”
Today, visitors can see the @ sign in MoMA’s Pirouette: Turning Points in Design exhibition, running until 15 November 2025. A symbol born in amphoras of Greek wine, carried through ledgers, typewriters, and the first email, now elevated to art.
The eternal curl
From a flourish in medieval manuscripts to a lifeline of modern communication, the @ sign is more than a keystroke. It is proof that even the most ordinary symbols can carry extraordinary stories — linking ancient merchants, medieval monks, office clerks, computer scientists, and, ultimately, you.
So next time you type your email address or tag a friend, pause for a second. That curled letter under your fingertips isn’t just punctuation. It’s history, identity, and imagination, spiralling together in a tiny loop that has survived 3,000 years.