@ means at now. when i was a kid before computers we had typewriters and the @ Symbol meant about.was up?

Question

@ means at now. when i was a kid before computers we had typewriters and the @ Symbol meant about.was up?

Answer 1

The typographic character @, the at sign, denotes a pan-lingual abbreviation of the word 'at'. It evolved from the phrase "at the rate of" in accounting and commercial invoices, e.g. “7 widgets @ $2 ea. = $14”. Nowadays, this commercial character is ubiquitous because of its use in e-mail addresses. In English, it is informally pronounced as at, and can be referred to as the at sign or the at symbol. Its official, typographic character nomenclature is commercial at in the ANSI/CCITT/Unicode character encoding standards.