What does @ mean?

A really elementary question, but what does the @ sign mean in a query?
I’m trying to number each row in the query results and all the help online for MySQL shows this kind of thing:

SELECT @rownum := @rownum +1 AS Count

but I don’t know what the symbol means and I can’t seem to find an explanation in either my book or online.

Duh, I just found an explanation! And yes, it was elementary!
For writing a user defined variable…