At Sign (@) in Morse Code
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The letters and digits of the code were settled in the nineteenth century, and even the procedural signals that came later — SOS among them — were in place by the early 1900s. The @ sign is the one genuinely modern addition: dot-dash-dash-dot-dash-dot, six symbols admitted to the official Morse set in 2004, more than a century and a half after the alphabet it joined.
Added in 2004, for Email Addresses
The International Telecommunication Union formally added @ to the official Morse character set on May 24, 2004, the 160th anniversary of Samuel Morse's first public telegraph transmission. It was added specifically because amateur radio operators had started needing to exchange email addresses over CW, and there was no way to send the @ symbol without spelling it out awkwardly as a word. The new character is officially called "commat," and its code is built by joining A's code to C's code with no gap between them — dot-dash, then dash-dot-dash-dot.
The First Change in Decades
According to the ITU at the time, it was the first addition to the Morse character set in roughly sixty years — a genuinely rare event for a code most people assume has been frozen in its original 19th-century form since the beginning.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who decided to add the @ sign to Morse code, and why then specifically?
The International Telecommunication Union added it in 2004 after amateur radio operators began needing to send email addresses over CW and had no clean way to key the symbol itself without spelling it out as a word.
When was the @ sign added to Morse code?
May 24, 2004 — and the ITU didn't pick that date at random. It's exactly 160 years on from Samuel Morse's first public telegraph demonstration, a deliberate anniversary tying the code's newest character back to its origin.