I know it predates e-mail addresses.
Answers:
History
It is not known which particular word gave rise to the modern at sign, although there are several theories, including:
In the Middle Ages, used by monks to shorten the Latin word ad which means "at, toward, or by." It also means about when followed by a numeral, though no Latin document showing the @ symbol used in this way is known.
In the 1400s for the Spanish unit of weight arroba = "jar".
An abbreviation of the Greek preposition ανά (ana), which means 'at the rate of' when used with numerals, exactly its modern commercial usage.
A professor of history in Rome, claims to have traced the @ symbol back to the Italian Renaissance in a Venetian mercantile document signed by Francesco Lapi on May 4, 1537.[citation needed] The document talks about commerces with Pizarro and in particular the price of an @ of wine in Peru, where @ stood for amphora (Italian anfora; Spanish and Portuguese arroba). The word arroba still means both the at symbol and a unit of weight (see below). Under this view, the symbol was used to represent one amphora, which was a unit of weight or volume based upon the capacity of the standard terra cotta jar, and came into use with the modern meaning "at the rate of" in northern Europe.
It could be the abbreviation of any word beginning in a, and more than one such symbol was likely in use, but there is no continuous record between any of the possibilities and the modern symbol.
One theory of the evolution of the "at" signFrom Norman French "à" meaning "at" in the sense of "each". "2 widgets à £5.50 = £11.00" is the sort of accountancy shorthand notation you will see on English commercial vouchers and ledgers all the way into the 1990s, where the usage was superseded for accountants with its email usage. It is also used in this way in Modern French and Swedish. According to this view, the at symbol is simply a stylish way of writing the à, so as not to remove the hand from the page in making the symbol. You can see hybrids between @ and à in French handwriting in street markets to this day.
The @ was present on the Lambert, a single element typewriter manufactured in 1902 by Lambert Typewriter Company of New York. Its inclusion in the original 1963 ASCII character set seems to have been unremarkable, so it was probably a standard character on commercial typewriters by that time.
It might have to do with the number 2 that it is a part of like
blank -to(2)-yahoo.com
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