The roman ampersand at left is stylised, but the italic one at right reveals its origin in the Latin word et.
An ampersand (&, &), also commonly called an and sign, is a logogram representing the conjunction "and". The symbol is a ligature of the letters in et, which is Latin for "and". Its origin is apparent in the second example in the image to the right; the first example, now more common, is a later development.
The ampersand often appeared as a letter at the end of the Latin alphabet, as for example in Byrhtferð's list of letters from 1011.[1] It is thought that teaching & as the last letter of the alphabet (... X Y Z and &), a common practice through the 19th century, led to its name, a corruption of the phrase "and per se and", meaning "and [the symbol which] by itself [is] and". The Scots and Scottish English name for & is epershand, derived from "et per se and" with the same meaning. [2]
History
The ampersand symbol has been found on ancient Roman sources dating to the first century A.D. During this period the symbol was a boxy-looking ligature of the capital letters E T. Over time the figure became more curved and flowing, until it came to resemble something like the figure below on the right, often called the "italic" ampersand.
By the eighth century AD, Western calligraphy was well developed, particularly in a form called Carolingian minuscule. The calligraphers made extensive use of the ampersand because the condensation of a word into a single character made their work easier. During this time the even more condensed ampersand, shown above on the left, was developed. It is often called the "roman" ampersand.
After the advent of printing in Europe in 1455, printers made extensive use of both the italic and roman ampersands. Every new typeface and font has included its own style of &. Since the ampersand's roots go back to Roman times, many languages that use a variation of the Latin alphabet make use of it.
Historically, & was regarded as the 27th letter of the English alphabet.[] Until recent times the alphabets used by children terminated not with Z but with & or related typographic symbols. George Eliot refers to this when she has Jacob Storey say, "He thought it (Z) had only been put to finish off th' alphabet like; though ampusand would ha' done as well, for what he could see."
The most likely reason why & was regarded as the 27th letter of the English alphabet is - and like many accounts about the history of punctuation this may be apocryphal - the traditional children's nursery rhyme for learning the alphabet with verbal past tenses (instead of the usual nouns as in "A is for apple, etc") called "A - apple pie". This traditional rhyme reads "A - apple pie. B bit it, C cut it, D dealt it, etc. Of course, when you get to the end of the end of the alphabet it becomes rather difficult to finish, so the standard version said "X, Y, Z and per se and, each had a little piece in their hand". The & sign was added to round off the rhyme (not unlike the lines "Now I know my ABC, next time won't you sing with me?" in the most popular contemporary alphabet song) and the common slurring of the end of the rhyme when spoken quickly or when recited by unlearned people gave rise to the folk usage "ampersand".
Usage
Although common in handwriting before typewriters came into widespread use, the ampersand has lost popularity in recent years, and it has become standard in most contexts to write out the word "and."
The main surviving use of the ampersand is in the formal names of businesses (especially firms and partnerships, particularly law firms, architectural firms, and stockbroker firms (the names of these also nearly always omit the serial comma)). A common explanation as to why the plus sign is not used instead is that a partnership is a relationship, and therefore more than simply adding one person with another.
The ampersand is also often used when addressing an envelope to a couple: "Mr. & Mrs. Jones," or "John & Mary."
The ampersand is also used for titles, such as Harry & Tonto, as well, and in some other proper names. In these cases, & is interchangeable with the word and; the distinction between them is mostly aesthetic. However, in film credits for story, screenplay, etc., & indicates a closer collaboration than and; in screenplays, for example, two authors joined with & collaborated on the script, while two authors joined with and wrote the script at different times and may not have consulted each other at all.
The conventional ampersand, as shown in the image at the top of this page, on the left, can be easily drawn by first making the cross stroke a bit farther to the right than where a common letter begins, shifting the pen to the center of this stroke, and then following the loop around.
In everyday handwriting, the ampersand is sometimes simplified to a curvy E superimposed by a vertical line, like a $ sign. Sometimes it is nothing more than a + sign, or a t with a loop; the loop is the remnant of a lowercase e.
The phrase et cetera ("and so forth") can be abbreviated &c. This is because the ampersand originally stood for the Latin et.
The ampersand represents a vowel in the orthography for the Marshallese language.
In APA style the ampersand is used when citing sources in text such as (Jones & Jones, 2005).
Computing
In the twentieth century, following the development of formal logic, the ampersand became a commonly used logical notation for the sentential connective AND. This usage was adopted by computer programmers: see below.
The ampersand corresponds to Unicode code point and ASCII character 38, or hexadecimal 0x0026. Largly depending on the locale's keyboard layout, the symbol normally shares space with the "6" or "7" key.
In some computer programming languages, the & sign is often used to indicate logical AND. Many computer languages with syntax derived from C differentiate between:
In the C/C++ programming languages, the & symbol, in addition to logical and bitwise AND described above, is used at the front of a variable name to refer to the address in memory of that variable. (This is called "referencing".) Also, in C++, if a formal parameter of a function is preceded by the & symbol then the parameter is passed as a reference.
In the BASIC programming language the & is used in two ways. It is often used to indicate a variable is of type long, or 32 bits in length. It is also used between two strings (variables or constants) to concatenate them.
In MySQL the '&' has dual roles. As a logical AND in addition it serves a bitwise operator of an intersection between elements.
When found at the end of a Unix shell command, the ampersand indicates that the indicated command is to be processed in the background.
In SGML, XML, and HTML, the ampersand is used to introduce an SGML entity. The HTML encoding for the ampersand character is the entity '&'. The XML entity is '&'.
Reference
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