The @ symbol has been in use for centuries, since long before email made it one of the most-typed characters on Earth. The first documented use dates all the way back to a 1536 letter written by an Italian merchant, who used a looping “a” as shorthand for amphorae — a traditional unit of volume roughly equal to a standard clay amphora jar. In other contexts, medieval scribes also used the symbol to mean “at the rate of,” helping to make calculations and bookkeeping more efficient.

As global trade expanded, merchants began using @ in ledgers to indicate price per unit — for example, three barrels @ five florins each. That practical function kept the symbol alive for hundreds of years, even as writing styles, currencies, and languages evolved. The average person, however, rarely encountered it outside of accounting and typewriters.

The “Q” in the QWERTY keyboard name stands for “quick.”

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The letters “QWERTY” don’t represent words — they are the first six letters on the top row of a computer keyboard.

That changed dramatically in 1971, when computer engineer Ray Tomlinson needed a character to separate a username from a host computer in the world’s first networked email. It had to be a symbol that was rarely used in names, yet widely understood across keyboards. He selected @, a typographic character used by developers that at the time meant “located at” — as in “user at computer.”

More than five decades later, the @ symbol now helps route billions of messages daily and anchors our digital identities across email and social platforms. Not bad for a 16th-century bookkeeper’s shorthand.

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By the time most people in Europe started eating with forks, chopsticks had already been around in Asia for millennia. The versatile utensil is believed to have been invented in China roughly 5,000 years ago, although it was initially little more than twigs used for cooking rather than eating (compared to human fingers, chopsticks were a much safer way to grab food from boiling water). None other than Confucius is credited with helping to make chopsticks popular as eating utensils sometime after 400 BCE. A man who espoused nonviolence, the philosopher believed that knives evoked bloodshed and the “honorable and upright man … allows no knives on his table.” (Chopsticks, then, were a more peaceful way to pick up food compared to spearing it with a knife.)

Mozart wrote the “Chopsticks” waltz.

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“The Celebrated Chop Waltz,” better known as “Chopsticks,” was the work of Euphemia Allan, writing under the name Arthur de Lulli. Allan did have a brother named Mozart, however, and fortunately for her, he was a music publisher.

Chopsticks gradually made their way beyond China’s borders and were the utensil of choice in other Asian countries such as Japan and Vietnam by 500 CE. Forks, meanwhile, slowly gained popularity throughout Europe after initially being used in their two-tined form by the ancient Greeks and Egyptians for cooking. Around the 11th century, they were introduced as eating utensils in Italy and France, after having initially been used in the Byzantine Empire — still in two-pronged form — but were widely frowned upon for centuries as unnecessarily luxurious or effeminate. Medieval Europe ate mostly with rounds of stale bread used as a platform for meat and vegetables, as well as with knives and spoons, which had been ubiquitous since ancient times. It wasn’t until around the 18th century that the use of forks — finally with three and four tines — became commonplace in much of Europe, in a slow process befitting their status as a late-to-the-party addition to the table.

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