Commercial At
Part of Basic ASCII: Alt 33 to 126
On Windows, hold Alt and type 64 on the numeric keypad to insert commercial at.
- Alt code
- Alt+64
- HTML entity
- @
- Unicode
- U+0040
About this symbol
Merchants used @ for centuries to mean “at the rate of”, as in 12 eggs @ 10 pence, which is how it earned a place on typewriter keyboards. Unicode still calls it the commercial at.
In 1971 the engineer Ray Tomlinson picked it to separate a person’s name from the name of their computer in the first networked email. It was already on the keyboard and almost never appeared in names, so it could not be mistaken for part of one. In Spanish and Portuguese it is called arroba, after an old unit of weight.
Unicode facts
- Official name
- COMMERCIAL AT
- Also called
- At sign, Arroba (old Spanish unit of weight)
- Type
- Punctuation
- Unicode block
- Basic Latin
- Unicode group
- ASCII punctuation
- Added in
- Unicode 1.1 (1993)
Click the symbol or any value at the top of the page to copy it. See the full Basic ASCII: Alt 33 to 126 chart for related characters.