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I done some research on the @ and found out it is trademarked
what does this mean ?
Since 23 October 2012, the At-sign is registered as a trade mark by the German Patent and Trade Mark Office—DPMA (registration number 302012038338) for @T.E.L.L.
While company promoters have claimed that it may from now on be illegal for other commercial interests to use the At-sign,[citation needed] this only applies to identical or confusingly similar goods and no court, German or otherwise, has yet ruled on this purported illegality.
A cancellation request was filed in 2013
The at sign, @, normally read aloud as "at", also commonly called the at symbol or commercial at, is originally an accounting and commercial invoice abbreviation meaning "at a rate of"
(e.g. 7 widgets @ £2 = £14).
In contemporary use, the at sign is most commonly used in email addresses. It was not included on the keyboard of the earliest commercially successful typewriters, but was on at least one 1889 model and the very successful Underwood models from the "Underwood No. 5" in 1900 onward. It is now universally included on computer keyboards.
The mark is encoded at U+0040 @ COMMERCIAL AT (HTML @)
.
The fact that there is no single word in English for the symbol has prompted some writers to use the French arobase or Spanish and Portuguese arroba, or to coin new words such as asperand, ampersat and strudel, but none of these has achieved wide usage.
Origin theories
@
symbol used as the initial "a" for the "amin" (amen)
formula in the Bulgarian translation of the Manasses Chronicle (c. 1345).
The Aragonese @ symbol used in the 1448 "taula de Ariza" registry to denote a wheat shipment from Castile to the Kingdom of Aragon.
@ used to signify French "à" ("at") from a 1674 protocol from a Swedish court (Arboga rådhusrätt och magistrat)
The earliest yet discovered reference to the @ symbol is a religious one; it features in a Bulgarian translation of a Greek chronicle written by Constantinos Manasses in 1345 (See Figure left). Held today in the Vatican Apostolic Library,[7] it features the @ symbol in place of the capital letter alpha 'A' in the word Amen. Why it was used in this context is still a mystery.
In terms of the commercial character of the at sign, there are several theories pending verification.
Whatever the origin of the @ symbol, the history of its usage is more well-known: it has long been used in Spanish and Portuguese as an abbreviation of arroba, a unit of weight equivalent to 25 pounds, and derived from the Arabic expression of "a quarter" (الربع pronounced ar-rubʿ).[8] An Italian academic claims to have traced the @ symbol to the 16th century, in a mercantile document sent by Florentine Francesco Lapi from Seville to Rome on May 4, 1536.
The document is about commerce with Pizarro, in particular the price of an @ of wine in Peru. In Italian, the symbol was interpreted to mean amphora (anfora). Currently, the word arroba means both the at-symbol and a unit of weight. In Italian, the symbol represents one amphora, a unit of weight and volume based upon the capacity of the standard amphora jar, and entered modern meaning and use as "at the rate of" or "at price of" in northern Europe.
Until now the first historical document containing a symbol resembling a @ as a commercial one is the Spanish "Taula de Ariza", a registry to denote a wheat shipment from Castile to Aragon in 1448. Even though the oldest fully developed modern @ sign is the one found on the above-mentioned Florentine letter.
Modern use
Commercial usage
In contemporary English usage, @ is a commercial symbol, called at site or at rate meaning at and at the rate of. It has rarely been used in financial documents[clarification needed] or grocers' price tags, and is not used in standard typography.[10]
source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign
what does this mean ?
Since 23 October 2012, the At-sign is registered as a trade mark by the German Patent and Trade Mark Office—DPMA (registration number 302012038338) for @T.E.L.L.
While company promoters have claimed that it may from now on be illegal for other commercial interests to use the At-sign,[citation needed] this only applies to identical or confusingly similar goods and no court, German or otherwise, has yet ruled on this purported illegality.
A cancellation request was filed in 2013
The at sign, @, normally read aloud as "at", also commonly called the at symbol or commercial at, is originally an accounting and commercial invoice abbreviation meaning "at a rate of"
(e.g. 7 widgets @ £2 = £14).
In contemporary use, the at sign is most commonly used in email addresses. It was not included on the keyboard of the earliest commercially successful typewriters, but was on at least one 1889 model and the very successful Underwood models from the "Underwood No. 5" in 1900 onward. It is now universally included on computer keyboards.
The mark is encoded at U+0040 @ COMMERCIAL AT (HTML @)
.The fact that there is no single word in English for the symbol has prompted some writers to use the French arobase or Spanish and Portuguese arroba, or to coin new words such as asperand, ampersat and strudel, but none of these has achieved wide usage.
Origin theories
@
symbol used as the initial "a" for the "amin" (amen)
formula in the Bulgarian translation of the Manasses Chronicle (c. 1345).
The Aragonese @ symbol used in the 1448 "taula de Ariza" registry to denote a wheat shipment from Castile to the Kingdom of Aragon.
@ used to signify French "à" ("at") from a 1674 protocol from a Swedish court (Arboga rådhusrätt och magistrat)
The earliest yet discovered reference to the @ symbol is a religious one; it features in a Bulgarian translation of a Greek chronicle written by Constantinos Manasses in 1345 (See Figure left). Held today in the Vatican Apostolic Library,[7] it features the @ symbol in place of the capital letter alpha 'A' in the word Amen. Why it was used in this context is still a mystery.
In terms of the commercial character of the at sign, there are several theories pending verification.
- One theory is that the symbol developed as a mercantile shorthand symbol of "each at"—the symbol resembling a small "a" inside a small "e"—to distinguish it from the different "at" (symbolized by the mere letter "a") or "per." For example, the cost of "12 apples @ $1" would be $12, whereas the cost of "12 apples at $1" would be $1—a crucial and necessary distinction.[citation needed]
- Another theory is that medieval monks abbreviated the Latin word ad (at, toward, by, about) next to a numeral. One reason for this abbreviation was that it saved space and ink. Since thousands of pages of biblical manuscripts were copied onto expensive papyrus or hides, and the words at, toward, by and about repeated millions of times throughout the pages, a considerable amount of resources could be spared this way. A theory concerning this graphic puts forward the idea that the form derives from the Latin word ad,[clarification needed], using the older form of lower case d : ∂, which persists as the partial derivative symbol.
- It has been theorized that it was originally an abbreviation of the Greek preposition ανά (transliterated ana), meaning at the rate of or per.[citation needed]
- Another theory is that it derives from the Norman French "à" meaning "at" in the "each" sense, i.e. "2 widgets à £5.50 = £11.00", comes the accountancy shorthand notation in English commercial vouchers and ledgers to the 1990s, when the email usage overtook the accountancy usage. It is also used like this in Modern French, Swedish or Czech; in this view, the at-symbol is a stylised form of à that avoids raising the writing hand from the page in drawing the symbol; this compromise between @ and à in French handwriting is found in street market signs.[citation needed]
Whatever the origin of the @ symbol, the history of its usage is more well-known: it has long been used in Spanish and Portuguese as an abbreviation of arroba, a unit of weight equivalent to 25 pounds, and derived from the Arabic expression of "a quarter" (الربع pronounced ar-rubʿ).[8] An Italian academic claims to have traced the @ symbol to the 16th century, in a mercantile document sent by Florentine Francesco Lapi from Seville to Rome on May 4, 1536.
The document is about commerce with Pizarro, in particular the price of an @ of wine in Peru. In Italian, the symbol was interpreted to mean amphora (anfora). Currently, the word arroba means both the at-symbol and a unit of weight. In Italian, the symbol represents one amphora, a unit of weight and volume based upon the capacity of the standard amphora jar, and entered modern meaning and use as "at the rate of" or "at price of" in northern Europe.
Until now the first historical document containing a symbol resembling a @ as a commercial one is the Spanish "Taula de Ariza", a registry to denote a wheat shipment from Castile to Aragon in 1448. Even though the oldest fully developed modern @ sign is the one found on the above-mentioned Florentine letter.
Modern use
Commercial usage
In contemporary English usage, @ is a commercial symbol, called at site or at rate meaning at and at the rate of. It has rarely been used in financial documents[clarification needed] or grocers' price tags, and is not used in standard typography.[10]
source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign
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