AN AMPERSAND IS a logogram "&"representing the conjunction word "and". This symbol originated as a ligature of the letterset, Latin for "and".
The word AMPERSAND is a corruption of the phrase "and (&) per se and", meaning and (the symbol &) intrinsically is the word and.
Traditionally, when reciting the alphabet in English-speaking schools, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself ("A", "I", and, at one point, "O") was preceded by the Latin expression per se ("by itself"). It was also common practice to add the "&" sign at the end of the alphabet as if it were the 27th letter, pronounced and. As a result, the recitation of the alphabet would end in "X, Y, Z, and per se and". This last phrase was
routinely slurred to "ampersand" and the term had entered common English usage by 1837. However, in contrast to the 26 letters, the ampersand does not represent a speech sound, although other characters that were dropped from the English alphabet, such as the Old English thorn, did.
Through popular etymology, it has been falsely claimed that Andre-Marie Ampere used the symbol in his widely read publications and that people began calling the new shape "Ampere's and."
THE AMPERSAND can be traced back to the 1st century A.D. and the Old Roman cursive, in which the letters E and T occasionally were written together to form a ligature. In the later and more flowing New Roman Cursive, ligatures of all kinds were extremely common. However, during the following development of the Latin script that led up to the Carolingian minuscule (9th century), while the use of ligatures in general diminished, the et-ligature continued to be used and gradually became more stylized and less revealing of its origin.
The modern italic type ampersand is a kind of "et" ligature that goes back to the cursive scripts developed during the Renaissance. After the advent of printing in Europe in 1455, printers made extensive use of both the italic and Roman ampersands. Since the ampersand's roots go back to Roman times, many languages that use a variation of the Latin alphabet make use of it.
The ampersand often appeared as a letter at the end of the Latin alphabet, as for example in Byrhtfero's list of letters from 1011. Similarly, & was regarded as the 27th letter of the English alphabet, as used by children (in the US). An example may be seen in M. B. Moore's 1863 book The Dixie Primer, for the Little Folks. In her 1859 novel Adam Bede, George Eliot refers to this when she makes Jacob Storey say: "He thought it had only been put to finish off th' alphabet like; though ampusand would ha' done as well, for what he could see."
The ampersand should not be confused with the Tironian "et", which is a symbol similar to the numeral 7. Both symbols have their roots in the classical antiquity, and both signs were used up through the Middle Ages as a representation for the Latin word "et" ("and"). However, while the ampersand was in origin a common ligature in the everyday script, the Tironian "et" was part of a highly specialised stenographic shorthand.
In everyday handwriting, the ampersand is sometimes simplified in design as a large lowercase epsilon or a numeral 3 superimposed by a vertical line. The ampersand is also often shown as 3 with a vertical line above and below it or a dot above and below it. The plus sign is often informally used in place of an ampersand, sometimes with an added loop.
In film credits for stories, screenplays, etc., & indicates a closer collaboration than and. The ampersand is used by the Writers Guild of America to denote two writers collaborating on a specific script, rather than one writer rewriting another's work. In screenplays, two authors joined with & collaborated on the script, while two authors joined with and worked on the script at different times and may not have consulted each other at all. In the latter case, they both contributed enough significant material to the screenplay to receive credit but did not work together (more than likely one was hired to rewrite the previous writer's script).
In APA style, the ampersand is used when
citing sources in text such as (Jones &
Jones, 2005). In the list of references, an
ampersand precedes the last author's name when there is more than one author. (This does not apply to MLA style, which calls for the "and" to be spelled.
The phrase et cetera (which means "and so forth"), usually written as etc. can be abbreviated &c. representing the combination et + c(etera).
The ampersand can be used to indicate that the "and" in a listed item is a part of the item's name and not a separator ("Rock, pop, rhythm & blues and hip hop").