Ever wonder about the origin of that @ in your email address?

I must admit that I have wondered once or twice about its origin.. but only those few times.

Thanks now to the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in New York City, we get some interesting insight into its origin.

Some linguists believe that @ dates back to the sixth or seventh century, a ligature meant to fuse the Latin preposition ad—meaning “at”, “to,” or “toward”—into a unique pen stroke. The symbol persisted in sixteenth-century Venetian trade, where it was used to mean amphora, a standard-size terracotta vessel employed by merchants, which had become a unit of measure. Interestingly, the current Spanish word for @, arroba, also indicates a unit of measure.

The @ symbol was known as the ‘”commercial ‘a’” when it appeared on the keyboard of the American Underwood typewriter in 1885, and it was defined as such, for the first time, in the American Dictionary of Printing & Bookmaking in 1894. From this point on the symbol itself was standardized both stylistically and in its application, and it appeared in the original 1963 ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) list of computer codes. At the time @ was explained as an abbreviation for the word “at” or for the phrase “at the rate of,” mainly used in accounting and commercial invoices.

From a post on MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design blog we learn that the museum has acquired the @ symbol into its collection.

The acquisition of @, they say, relies on the assumption that physical possession of an object as a requirement for an acquisition is no longer necessary, and therefore it sets curators free to tag the world and acknowledge things that “cannot be had”—because they are too big (buildings, Boeing 747’s, satellites), or because they are in the air and belong to everybody and to no one, like the @—as art objects befitting MoMA’s collection.

Have a skip over to the MOMA blog, appropriately named “Inside/Out” and have a look @ MOMA

I’m Tom Murphy and thanks for helping me give Ephemera the Encore it deserves.

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