That's like how the symbol @ used to be called "commercial at" (this is its Unicode name). This is because of how sales were listed on receipts and such, think "4 apples @ 50¢ each".
In the 90s/00s it was often referred to as 'miukumauku' in Finnish, roughly translates as 'meowmeow', as in the sound a cat makes, since it somewhat looks like a sleeping cat.
I forget the exact details, but I've seen it called a snail in some programming language or other - I remember getting an error message along the lines of 'unexpected snail at line x'! I wish I could recall what language it was - perhaps something verilog related?
In the subcontinent, almost everybody pronounces this "at-the-rate-of". I guess they learn this in school or something. Makes you do a double take the first couple of times someone reads you an email adress :)
Very briefly worked in a metal fabrication shop in the last gasp of pre-CAD and electronic records. Writing out the bill of materials (by hand, to be typed up) involved a lot of numbers - measurements, quantities, and prices.
Using symbols like # before a quantity, @ before a unit price, or ⌀ before a diameter was considered critical for minimizing confusion. I think it was meant to work like a sort of Hungarian notation for numbers, so if someone’s transcribing them into an order form or something, and they find themselves copying a diameter into a price column, they catch themselves on the type mismatch.
It never seemed like there was much room for ambiguity in any of the lists I wrote up, but I guess when you screw up an order to a steel supplier and get the quantity mixed up with the length, that can be a pretty expensive mistake.
In Spanish the @ is used, mainly in text chat, as both an "a" and an "o" at the same time. Saves time when you want to address both males and females: "amig@s" instead of "amigos y amigas"
The @ is sometimes used like "apples, 50¢ @" in which it is read as "each" rather than "at". This may have faded out once email addresses popularized it as "at", but it always made more sense to me since @ looks like an "ea" ligature.
Ah, I wasn’t aware of this, but it makes a lot of sense! It even looks like it could be a ligature of “eac”, and it’s very natural to imagine a cursive each being abbreviated first to @h and eventually to just @ by a busy clerk.