“@” U+0040: Commercial At

ℹ️ About

The Commercial At (@) is a fundamental punctuation mark in modern computing. Originally used in commerce to indicate “at the rate of,” it was repurposed by Ray Tomlinson in 1971 for the first email system to separate the user name from the host name. Today, it is ubiquitous in email addresses and as a prefix for “mentions” or “handles” across social media platforms like X (Twitter) and Instagram.

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