at sign

The etymology of at sign refers us to language Arabic, more precisely to a term that can be translated as "fourth part". According to the first meaning mentioned in the dictionary elaborated by the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), an at is a unit of mass whose weight is equal to 11,502 kg (a quarter of a quintal).

The arroba, as a unit of measure, stopped being used in the middle of the XIX century. In any case, it is still used in rural sectors and even as a measure of a fluid whose weight it depends on the region.

At present, the notion of at is very popular in the computing. Arroba is the symbol used in a email address (email) to distinguish between the user's name and the domain to which the service in question belongs.

The at (which is often expressed in masculine: the at) is a symbol formed by a letter to with a circle around it. In the English language, it is pronounced as at, which can be translated as "on". In this way, the direction of email indicates that a user's account X it is housed "on" a certain server.

Social networks like Twitter and Instagram, for their part, they use the at symbol to name their users. For example: @Definition of is the Twitter user of Definition of. If a person starts to follow @Definition of, therefore, you will be able to read in your timeline the tweets published by this user.

The popularity of the arroba has grown in recent years, precisely thanks to the importance of its use in these social media, and little by little it has detached itself from its exclusive relationship with e-mail, an area in which most users knew it at the beginning of the 90s. In Spanish-speaking countries, unlike what happens in English-speaking, it is read by its name and does not have a connotation that helps us understand why we use it, so people outside of computing have had to work harder to get used to it.

Other sign that has become very common thanks to the massification of social networks is the numeral (#), which in English is called hashtag. In this case, Anglo-Saxon pronunciation has been generalized in almost the whole world, although with certain concessions to adjust to the phonetic characteristics of each language. In any case, both the at and the numeral are synonyms of communication, of trends, of "being up to date."

Writing the at sign is an action that can present certain difficulties, even if they are minor, especially on the computer and by hand. Although telephones always present us with the symbol when it may be necessary, such as when entering our email address or conducting a search for a user on a social network, the keyboards computers present an extra challenge: they require the combination of two keys to generate it.

This can cause confusion for less expert users, especially those who have approached computing through mobile phones. But the complication increases when the keyboard is configured in a different language than the one used by the operating system, since then it is very likely that it will be useless to observe the signs and symbols printed on their buttons, but we must memorize the appropriate combination. Drawing it is also difficult for some people, as much as the sign &, which is called et or, according to its name in English, ampersand.