How to type At Sign
@ is Shift + 2 on a US keyboard and Shift + ' on a UK one. Press Shift + 2 on a UK keyboard and you get " instead, which is the whole of why the key looks wrong: nothing is broken and the layout is simply the other one. Alt + 64 on the numeric keypad produces it on any Windows layout, which is the way in when the keyboard in front of you has no key for it, and @ writes it in HTML. Its codepoint is U+0040.
Commercial At
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+0040
- Windows
- Alt + 64
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 64 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| HTML | @ | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+0040 | COMMERCIAL AT |
Other symbols
@ lives in the Basic Latin block (U+0000-U+007F), the original ASCII set: the letters, digits and punctuation printed on a US keyboard. Within Unicode it is classified as Po, a punctuation mark.
What At Sign is used for
In mathematical notation @ is an ordinary symbol: it carries no special spacing and sits in an expression the way a letter does, standing for a thing rather than doing something to the things around it. That is the classification unicode-math gives it, and it is what decides how the symbol is set: $\mathatsign$ in LaTeX, in maths mode rather than in a sentence.
Unicode publishes a second list of names for @ in CLDR, the keywords its own search data offers rather than the formal name, and they are ampersat, arobase, arroba and commercial. Those words are what somebody looking for this character is liable to type when At Sign is not the name they know it by, and the search on the symbol lists matches them as well as the Unicode name.
What Unicode says about At Sign
The standard recognises @ under another name as well: arroba (old Spanish unit of weight). That is a formal alias, not a nickname, which is why it turns up in other people's documentation for the same codepoint.
The code chart points from @ to circled latin small letter a (U+24D0). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when At Sign looks nearly right but not quite.
How At Sign behaves in software
@ takes one column in a terminal. It carries no direction of its own, so in a line that mixes English with Arabic or Hebrew it takes the direction of the text around it rather than forcing one.
What people ask about At Sign
How to type at sign on uk keyboard?
Shift + 2 on a US keyboard, Shift + ' on a UK one. Alt + 64 on the numeric keypad works on either.
Every way to write At Sign
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+0040 |
| Decimal | 64 |
| UTF-8 bytes | 40 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 00 40 |
| HTML entity | @ |
| HTML numeric | @ or @ |
| CSS | \0040 |
| JavaScript | \u0040 |
| Python | \u0040 |
| URL-encoded | %40 |
| LaTeX, in maths mode | $\mathatsign$ |
| SVG | 0040.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If @ needs escaping
@ is one byte in ASCII, in UTF-8 and in every code page in common use, so it never arrives corrupted. Its problem is the opposite one: it means something to the software reading it. In HTML it can be written @, in a URL it is %40, and inside a CSV field, a shell command or a regular expression it has to be quoted or escaped rather than typed plainly. That is also why @ is the character people substitute when the one they wanted will not type.