How to type at sign (@)
Also called at symbol, commercial at, email sign.
Hold Shift with your right little finger and press the 2 key with your left ring finger. On a UK keyboard the @ is on the apostrophe key instead, to the right of the semicolon.
Which finger types @
- Finger
- Left ring
- Resting position
- S on the home row
- Shift
- Required, held by the other hand
- Hand
- left
No website can detect which finger you actually used — a browser reports the character, not the hand that produced it. The finger above is the one the standard touch typing layout assigns, and it is the one the lessons here train.
What @ is used for
- Separates the user name from the domain in every email address.
- Mentions a person on social platforms, as in @username.
- Marks a decorator in Python and an annotation in Java.
- Prefixes a rule in CSS, such as @media or @import.
Where it comes from
Merchants used it for centuries to mean “at the rate of” — five crates @ two pounds each. It was so obscure by the 1960s that it survived on the keyboard largely unused, which is exactly why Ray Tomlinson chose it in 1971 to separate a user from a machine in the first network email: nobody's name could possibly contain one.
The mistake people make
The UK and US layouts disagree about this key. On a US keyboard @ is Shift+2 and the double quote is Shift+apostrophe; on a UK keyboard those two are swapped. Typing @ and getting " is the single clearest sign your operating system's keyboard layout does not match the keyboard in front of you.
If the key is missing or gives the wrong character
- Windows: hold Alt and type 64 on the numeric keypad.
- Mac: Option+2 on some international layouts.
- Mobile: usually on the first symbol page, and on the main keyboard in email fields.
Practise it properly
Knowing which finger owns a key is not the same as using it without thinking. The Typometer course blocks on the wrong key and names the finger for every one, so the habit forms rather than the knowledge.
Other keys
Related guides
Free, and no account needed.
- Start at level 1: the home rowFind F and J without looking, one key at a time.
- How to learn touch typingWhat actually works, what to ignore, and how long it takes.
- The full typing course415 levels from the home row to code and professional documents.
- Untimed typing practicePractise without a clock and focus on the keys you keep missing.