>there is perhaps no character that holds more cultural weight than @

This is a wild claim. Even excluding the 52 Latin alphabet symbols, period has such more cultural weight than the at sign.

So 3000 years is a guess at the age of the word "amphora", but @ is from the year 1536.

Worth noting is that @ was not the universal separator for host and username. BITNET (and its sister networks) based on IBM’s networking protocols used with word “AT” (separated by spaces) so, back in the olden days I was U12921 AT UICVM. UUCP placed the host name first and used ! to separate the hostname from the user with explicit routing occasionally given by multiple !s to separate a list of machines, e.g., foo!bar!jarthur!dhosek And the DECNET protocol used :: with the host name first (e.g., YMIR::DHOSEK) It wasn’t until the grand unification of all the various academic and commercial networks in the late 80s with the “net of nets” which became the Internet that @ became more universal, although IBM systems retained their “AT” and VMS systems had the awkward IN%"dhosek@ymir.claremont.edu" syntax to allow emailing outside the local DECnet.

In Polish it's called małpa (monkey). I always thought of this as weird — turns out the Poles were not alone in noticing the resemblance :D

Rx is possibly the last Egyptian hieroglyph in use.

https://www.history.com/articles/where-did-the-rx-symbol-com...

Little mouse. How cute. I can’t unsee it now.

It is a common practice in South Indian languages, to wrap letters with a tail or spiral, to mean something more than letter itself. In Telugu, people used to start all of their writing with a "Sri" as a single letter, with a tail wrapped around it. This is mostly seen on post cards, or anything written on paper.

Wrapped letters have special meaning, like goods with a special package.

Around 1999 I interned at Philips Semiconductor. I worked with one of the first or early engineers of Teletext (aka BBC Ceefax) - a system designed in the 1970s that encoded text pages within an analog TV signal.

The World Wide Web was just getting popular and he was happy to point out he managed to get @ into the limited character set (maybe called a codepage?) all the way back in the 1970s. However many (all?) international variants used different character sets that replaced @ and other uncommon characters with accented characters for their alphabets/languages.

As a result Teletext in the UK (using the english character set) could show email addresses, but not in most (all?) other countries.

> In Spain and Portugal, the word for @ is "arroba", a term related to amphora that is also a standard unit of weight and measure.

It is in fact still used in certain contexts. For deciding when to slaughter the Iberian pig after feeding it exclusively with acorns in the open, it must weight 9 to 10 @s (an @ is 11.5kg, so 103.5 to 115kg)

Great article. I had long thought that the official name for the symbol was "asperand", but it seems like this is a recent invention!

I seem to have missed the part of the article that explains how this symbol goes back 3000 years. The earliest date mentioned is in the 1300's.

Heh, in Finnish it is often called “miuku mauku”, almost like “meow meow”, or perhaps “meowdy meowdi”. Didn’t see any other cat-themed nick names.