Where did the symbol @ come from?
The ampersand symbol has been found on ancient Roman sources dating to the first century A.D. Marcus Tullius Tiro, Cicero’s secretary of 36 years, is credited as its inventor. During this period the symbol was a boxy-looking ligature of the capital letters E and T. Over time the figure became more curved and flowing, until it came to resemble something like the figure above on the right, often called the “italic” ampersand. By the eighth century AD, Western calligraphy was well developed, particularly in forms such as Uncial, Insular script, and Carolingian minuscule. The calligraphers made extensive use of the ampersand because the condensation of a word into a single character made their work easier. During this time the even more condensed ampersand, shown above on the left, was developed. It is often called the “Roman” ampersand. The ampersand often appeared as a letter at the end of the Latin alphabet, as for example in Byrhtferð’s list of letters from 1011. After the advent of pr
With all due respect to PSHH, the symbol in question is not the ampersand (&), but the “at” symbol. I found the following at http://atsymbol.com/history.htm : The actual origin of the @ symbol remains an enigma. History tells us that the @ symbol stemmed from the tired hands of the medieval monks. During the Middle Ages before the invention of printing presses, every letter of a word had to be painstakingly transcribed by hand for each copy of a published book. The monks that performed these long, tedious copying duties looked for ways to reduce the number of individual strokes per word for common words. Although the word “at” is quite short to begin with, it was a common enough word in texts and documents that medieval monks thought it would be quicker and easier to shorten the word “at” even more. As a result, the monks looped the “t” around the “a” and created it into a circle-eliminating two strokes of the pen. Another st
