Where do signatures come from?

A guest article with Anto Wants To Know | April 2025

Apr 08, 2025

Signatures could be almost anything: they could be letters, words, drawings or even lines. The only thing they couldn’t be was meaningless, spontaneous straws.

Almost all of us have them and many of us, like this week’s guest author, can remember a time in our youth when we lavishly scrawled across paper as we’d seen ‘the grown-ups’ do, swirling our name into ever-increasing illegibility to create our key to maturity: our first signature.

A sign of authenticity from a bygone, offline era, yet so easy to forge that many a child has practised replicating their parents’ mark to escape some school-based horror, the signature has endured where cheque books and the credit card swipe have not.

But why?

Addressing just this question, this week’s guest post is brought to us by Antonella of

Anto wants to know

. Antonella is a 26-year-old writer based in Argentina. She works as a freelancer and in her free time learns random facts and writes about them.

Where do signatures come from?

Anto Wants To Know

Old writing and artistic elements. — Image created by the author on Canva

I started practicing my signature in blank pieces of paper before I even knew how to write. I liked how fast and spontaneous signatures seemed to be when adults did them, so I just replicated that: enigmatic lines with little to no effort. Some of them were pretty good and maybe I should have used them once I was old enough to sign things myself, but they had one essential problem: they were so spontaneous I could not replicate them at all.

Then I grew up a bit and understood that signatures seem spontaneous, but they are not (I think a part of me always knew this). I asked some adults in my life how they had found their own and they all had different answers: some used their initials while others just drew something that was easy to remember and went with it.

The ones with a simpler approach even went as a far as using name and surname with a line below it.

So, the more I heard, the more I understood that signatures could be almost anything: they could be letters, words, drawings or even lines. The only thing they couldn’t be was meaningless, spontaneous straws.

Before Signatures

The essence behind signatures has been around since way before we started using them for our leases. Back in 3000 BC Ancient Mesopotamians pressed carved cylinders into wet clay, while Egyptians used hieroglyphics to make their orders official.

During the middle ages people started using small, simple written signs in any important document. Hardly anyone knew how to write, so adding a symbol (crosses most of the time) was a pretty standard, simple way to clarify that the person who was signing the document was the right one.

The First Signature In The Latin Language

“El Cid” was a Spanish military leader who donated some money to the Cathedral of Valencia. The problem with this? He wanted the credit for it. So, he needed a way to let everyone know not only that the donation was valid, but also where it came from. This is exactly why he signed in Latin. At this point there was a new element added to the whole confirmation aspect of it: identity.

People could create their signatures and use them anytime they needed to not only take responsibility for something they were agreeing to, but also to own something they had created. During the renaissance period, artists decided to sign their work to make sure anyone could know they were the mind and hands behind them rather than just leaving that to open interpretation.

By the 1600s, England came up with a law saying that certain contracts had to be signed to be legally binding, so it was already official: a scrawled name or initial was just as important as a spoken promise but easier to prove.

Confirmation, responsibility, identity and legal weight, all in just a scrawl.

The Problem With Signatures

When I finally had to sign something that actually mattered (an ID, a bank document, something that made me officially exist in the adult world) my signature became… disappointing. It wasn’t enigmatic or spontaneous: just a rushed, slightly uneven version of my name that looked nothing like the ones I had practiced. But, guess what? I could remember it every time, which is pretty huge. And just like real signatures were not as exciting as the ones I played with, legally tamed signatures came with a lot of their own issues (most of them related to either how easy or how hard they are to make).

Back in 1600s William Chaloner was faking official signatures on banknotes and government documents for a living. He was so good at it that he nearly crashed England’s economy before getting caught by Isaac Newton (yes, that Isaac Newton) who was in charge of the Royal Mint at the time.

Chaloner’s forgeries were so convincing that they exposed the flaw in the system probably any teenager who has signed something as their parents can tell you about: signatures alone aren’t enough to prove authenticity.

But forgery is not the only issue: inconsistency is a big one as well. A signature needs to stay the same every time, or it starts losing its credibility. If it looks different with each use, how can anyone trust it’s the real deal? That’s exactly why Disney makes every Mickey Mouse performer master the same signature, so no matter who’s signing, it always looks like it came from the one and only Mickey.

But, why is consistency a problem? Well, some people either forget about this detail or simply decide to ignore it. Shakespeare, for example, had six surviving signatures and all look wildly different. Some are barely legible while others have strange spelling variations. I find it personally hilarious, but some took this inconsistency to fuel their conspiracy theories on whether his writing was even his.

Why Are We Still Using Them?

Shakespeare book on a library. — Image created by the author on Canva

Signatures have caused their fair share of problems: they are not as reliable as they should and some would even argue that they are outdated. They are simple enough to be forged but, at least for some people, too complex to stay consistent over time.

So, if signatures are as meaningful as they are full of errors, why are we still using them? Well, it could be that we, as humans, are exactly the same.