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A Natural History of the @ Sign The many names of the at sign in various languages, 1997, Retrieved June 2013. Germans, Poles, and South Africans call @ “monkey’s tail” in each different language. It is also commonly used to abbreviate atau which means 'or', 'either'. In Indian English, speakers often say at the rate of (with e-mail addresses quoted as "example at the rate of example.com").

In assembly language, @ is sometimes used as a dereference operator. In Python 2.4 and up, it is used to decorate a function . In Python 3.5 and up, it is also used as an overloadable matrix multiplication operator. In Objective-C, @ is prefixed to language-specific keywords such as @implementation and to form string literals. In Forth, it is used to fetch values from the address on the top of the stack. The Aragonese @ symbol used in the 1448 "taula de Ariza" registry to denote a wheat shipment from Castile to the Kingdom of Aragon.
verb
Look up commercial-ator at sign in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. The symbol was added in 2004 for use with email addresses, the only official change to Morse code since World War I. Variations exist – especially if verbal communication is very noisy – such as a bundar and a bulat (both meaning 'circled A'), a keong ('snail A'), and a monyet ('monkey A').

As a prefix it also allows keywords to be used as identifiers, a form of stropping. In the ASP.NET MVC Razor template markup syntax, the @ character denotes the start of code statement blocks or the start of text content. In American English the @ can be used to add information about a sporting event.
At: time
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In modal logic, specifically when representing possible worlds, @ is sometimes used as a logical symbol to denote the actual world (the world we are "at"). In an LXDE autostart file , @ is prefixed to a command to indicate that the command should be automatically re-executed if it crashes. In Dyalog APL, @ is used as a functional way to modify or replace data at specific locations in an array. On web pages, organizations often obscure the email addresses of their members or employees by omitting the @. This practice, known as address munging, makes the email addresses less vulnerable to spam programs that scan the internet for them. Hold down the shift key, otherwise you will type an inverted comma instead of an 'at' sign.
British Dictionary definitions for at (3 of
The earliest yet discovered symbol in this shape is found in a Bulgarian translation of a Greek chronicle written by Constantinos Manasses in 1345. The evolution of the symbol as used today is not recorded. In Nepali, the symbol is called "at the rate." Commonly, people will give their email addresses by including the phrase "at the rate". In contemporary English usage, @ is a commercial symbol, meaning at and at the rate of or at the price of.

In Spanish, where many words end in "-o" when in the masculine gender and end "-a" in the feminine, @ is sometimes used as a gender-neutral substitute for the default "o" ending. For example, the word amigos traditionally represents not only male friends, but also a mixed group, or where the genders are not known. The proponents of gender-inclusive language would replace it with amig@s in these latter two cases, and use amigos only when the group referred to is all-male and amigas only when the group is all female. In DIGITAL Command Language, the @ character was the command used to execute a command procedure. To run the command procedure VMSINSTAL.COM, one would type @VMSINSTAL at the command prompt. In C#, it denotes "verbatim strings", where no characters are escaped and two double-quote characters represent a single double-quote.
British Dictionary definitions for at (2 of
To show the word "HELLO" in line 1, column 1.In FoxPro/Visual FoxPro, it is also used to indicate explicit pass by reference of variables when calling procedures or functions . In Swift, @ prefixes "annotations" that can be applied to classes or members. Annotations tell the compiler to apply special semantics to the declaration like keywords, without adding keywords to the language.

Where opposing sports teams have their names separated by a "v" , the away team can be written first – and the normal "v" replaced with @ to convey at which team's home field the game will be played. This usage is not followed in British English, since conventionally the home team is written first. On some social media platforms and forums, usernames may be prefixed with an @ (in the form @johndoe); this type of username is frequently referred to as a "handle". @ symbol used as the initial "a" for the "amin" formula in the Bulgarian of the Manasses Chronicle, c. Although not included on the keyboard of the earliest commercially successful typewriters, it was on at least one 1889 model and the very successful Underwood models from the "Underwood No. 5" in 1900 onward. It started to be used in email addresses in the 1970s, and is now routinely included on most types of computer keyboards.
It is most commonly used in the form @echo off which not only switches off echoing but prevents the command line itself from being echoed. A common contemporary use of @ is in email addresses , as in (the user jdoe located at the domain example.com). Ray Tomlinson of BBN Technologies is credited for having introduced this usage in 1971. More examples Granddad wrote 'at' in the address instead of the @ symbol - that's why it didn't work. Enjoy the flexibility of a Prepaid plan - no annual contract and no credit check.

The word in the example sentence does not match the entry word. Improve your vocabulary with English Vocabulary in Use from Cambridge. Learn the words you need to communicate with confidence. We recognize our responsibility to use data and technology for good. Buy your gifts online and get free shipping and flexible returns.
In Icelandic, it is referred to as atmerkið ("the at sign") or hjá, which is a direct translation of the English word at. In the Koalib language of Sudan, @ is used as a letter in Arabic loanwords. The Unicode Consortium rejected a proposal to encode it separately as a letter in Unicode. SIL International uses Private Use Area code points U+F247 and U+F248 for lowercase and capital versions, although they have marked this PUA representation as deprecated since September 2014.
