ATTHERATE!

What’s the deal with attherate? I thought everyone said ‘at’ when expressing the ‘@’ symbol - apparently not. My Indian coworker, when telling me his email address, said ‘blahblahblah-attherate-gmaildotcom’. I had no idea what he meant and thought he was pulling some kind of Borat move on me, which he frequently does. He insisted attherate is the correct way to say ‘@’ in India and one quick Google check verified it. This led me to thinking about the ‘@’ symbol. I always assumed it was made by writing the word ‘at’ in cursive very quickly. Also, since it is clearly a symbol meant to save time and space, it seems nuts to spell it out, or say it, with so many words and syllables.

As it turns out, the earliest known ‘@’ is from the 14th century, in Venice, representing a jar ("anfora") and signifying a weight quantity. From there it went into dictionaries, was included in the first Underwood typewriter (1885), and made its way to the keyboards we use today. Ray Tomlinson, the man who sent the world’s first email (to himself, of course) wanted a symbol that was so weird it couldn’t possibly appear in anyone’s name; he chose the @ symbol.

Why do we say at? Some think the symbol is related to the Latin ‘ad’, meaning ‘at’. This is probably untrue (see evidence above), but the name stuck, at least in English. The symbol is a sort of Rorschach test, with different cultures seeing different things (usually animals) in it. The Koreans and French see a snail (snails are popular delicacies in both countries), and other countries see different animals and name the symbol accordingly. Where the Indians got ‘attherate’ is beyond me.