12. How English Symbols Got Their Shapes

Star-Spangled Stories. Article 12.

How English Symbols Got Their Shapes

From Latin scribes to email: the secret lives of &, @, # and $

Every day we type characters on the keyboard that we often cannot even name. The & joins business partners, the @ sends emails, the # marks topics on social media and the $ reminds us of money. They look modern, but their stories reach from ancient manuscripts to the first computer networks.

Even more interesting is that for some symbols the origin is very well documented, while for others there are several competing explanations. So the history of symbols is also a lesson in telling a nice legend from a really documented etymology.

Ampersand (&): two Latin letters in one

The & was created by joining the Latin letters e and t, that is, the conjunction et ("and"). Scribes often shortened repeated words: if you write something a hundred times, you create a simple stroke of the pen. In some typefaces you can still see both historical letters in the ampersand today.

The English name ampersand comes from an old way of reciting the alphabet: "and per se and", roughly "& by itself means and". This play on words gradually turned into a one-word name. So the symbol has survived two thousand years because it still saves space and works well as a visual link.

At sign (@): a merchant who moved to the internet

Long before the internet, the @ marked the price per unit in business records, for example "5 items @ $2". In 1971, the programmer Ray Tomlinson used it in a new kind of network email to separate the user's name from the name of the computer. He chose it partly because it reads well as English at and rarely appears in personal names.

So the idea that Tomlinson invented the at sign is wrong. His achievement was a new use of an old symbol. A sign meant to show a price became the worldwide symbol of a digital address.

The hash (#): from numbers to hashtags

In English texts the # has several names: number sign, hash, and in American contexts also pound sign. The word octothorpe or octothorp for it probably appeared in the world of telephone technology in the 20th century. The different names remind us that the same shape can do different jobs.

It got an important new function in 2007, when Chris Messina suggested using # to group posts on Twitter. A historically ambiguous symbol became the hashtag – a tool for searching and public conversation. It is good to distinguish the # sign from a whole hashtag, for example #EnglishHistory.

The dollar ($): a surprisingly unclear family tree

Many stories go around about the $ sign. One derives it from the letters U and S joined together, as in United States. But that is problematic, because similar signs were used earlier. More serious discussions include a development from abbreviations for the Spanish peso, or the symbolism of pillars on Spanish coins.

The Smithsonian points out that the two vertical lines may be connected with the Pillars of Hercules on Spanish dollar coins. But the exact origin of the symbol is not completely clear. With this sign in particular, it is worth telling students: we know a lot, but some popular legends cannot be confirmed.

Percent (%), the asterisk (*) and other small things

The % sign is connected with traditional abbreviations of the phrase per cento – "out of a hundred". The asterisk * also has an old origin: English asterisk comes from the Greek word for "little star". Signs like these let scribes save time, and later they moved into print and the computer world.

The development of symbols is often similar to the development of words. First it is a practical abbreviation, then its shape becomes fixed, and finally it gains new meanings that its original users could not have foreseen.

What does our keyboard tell us about the history of language?

The keyboard is a strange museum. Some keys carry remains of Latin, others a memory of business bookkeeping, and others recall the first digital networks. Old symbols do not die; they adapt to new jobs.

If a Roman scribe saw an ampersand in a company logo, he might recognize his old et. And a programmer from the 1970s might not have expected the inconspicuous @ to become a symbol we cannot imagine everyday communication without.

An important note

The origin of the $ sign has not been finally solved. Calling it simply a combination of U and S would be historically misleading.