The Ampersand

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H&M, M&M's, Ben & Jerry's – what’s the one thing common to these notable brand names?

It’s the curved squiggle – the ampersand – that lies between them. Now, you know that this symbol is used in place of the word “and”. But why? Why is it used to replace “and”? Why is it called the “ampersand”? Does it occupy a unique position in the alphabet?

These questions got me thinking, and I did some research to find answers to them, and here is what I got.

The ampersand is not a punctuation mark, and it’s not really a letter like “a” or “b”. Yet, we use it frequently in our written language. So, what makes this symbol unique?

Well, the ampersand is a ligature. A ligature is a character that is formed by the combination of two or more letters. For instance, the character æ as used in English is a ligature formed by combining the letters “a” and “e”.

Similarly, the ampersand is a combination of the letters “e” and “t”. This symbol is not something that is relatively new. It had been in use as far back as in the first century A.D. The word “et” in Latin meant “and”, and the Romans found it stylish to combine the “e” and the “t” into a single character, thereby forming a ligature for the word “and”. This makes the ampersand a logogram as well. A logogram is any symbol that represents a word, and, in this case, the ampersand is a logogram representing the word “and”.

But wait a minute…. Where are the “e” and “t” in today’s ampersand (&)? As you may have guessed, the symbol has evolved into something that is more stylish and jauntier than olden times.

 

For a while, the ampersand was considered to be the 27th letter of the English alphabet. And this is how students recited the alphabet in those days:

“A, B, C … X, Y, Z, and, per se, &”. “Per se” is again a Latin phrase meaning “by itself”. The “per se” added when reciting the alphabet meant that the ampersand was not only a character, but was, by itself a word as well. (The “per se” was not only used before the ampersand, but before other letters as well, such as the “I” or “A” that were used both as words and individual characters.)

This recital of “And - per se – and” in the alphabet eventually became the word “ampersand” that we know today. Isn’t that interesting?

The ampersand today is generally considered as an abbreviation of “and”. Hence, we don’t generally use it in formal writing, and usually see its usage in business & brand names.



Thanks for your time! Feel free to comment & share your views!

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