Posted on 09/30/2018 8:04:00 AM PDT by Moonman62
As with a lot of aspects of typography, the history of the ampersand begins with our triumphant and progressive friends, the Ancient Romans.
Roman scribes would write in cursive so as to increase the speed of their transcription, often combining letters into one form to save time while also increasing legibility, where certain characters overlap in a visually discordant manner — this was the birth of the ligature. The ampersand is simply a ligature of the letters E and T (et being the latin word for and).
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The Etymology
Before deconstructing the word ampersand, you must first understand another latin legacy that made its way into our modern language.
By the early seventeen hundreds, schools throughout England had started to use the phrase per se (essentially meaning by itself) when spelling out words. This was specifically useful when encountering words that consist of only a single letter (A, I and originally O).
At the same time, and (the et-ligature &, now pronounced and) had become common place and was all but inducted into the English language as the 27th letter of the alphabet. It became so widely used that children in school, when reciting the alphabet, would include & after the letter Z. The result of this was that phonetically you would hear “X, Y, Z and per se and” indicating that the & stood by itself at the end of the alphabet. The phrase “and per se and” was inevitably slurred into one single term and by 1837, the term ampersand was well and truly immortalised in the English dictionary.
A less incoherent history source or snippit would be helpful.
Good stuff. Anyone know what’s up with “#”?
It was “number symbol” or “pound symbol” and lately, “hashtag.”
Please don’t trivialize the Lord’s Day. /jk
Where in the hell did the name "hash tag" come from . . . what a stupid name.
You forgot octothorpe.
'Ampersand come home'.
That was fine & this is not a thread on how to interject rude comments. You can take your comment & store it where illumination can not find it.
It first got it’s start as a game called tic tac toe.....
Interesting. Thanks!
Did you try going to the source article? It’s more complete and has illustrations.
Thank you for saying it.
I had to look it up. This is an ampersand “&”.
It’s interesting that while being a shorthand form for the Latin “et” meaning “and”, the ampersand is most often used today as part of the construction “& etc.” making it literally redundant.
It was “number symbol” or “pound symbol” and lately, “hashtag.”
And, for us Old Folks who still see this - # - as pound, it gives new meaning to the #metoo movement...
And you rudeness? Wow. Look, my 11 year old could write a more coherent explanation and history about the ampersand. I do give credit that there is no aparant reference to Wikipedia. That does count for something in my book.
Yeah, oh so smart Alyssa Milano and her crowd didn’t think that through.
In 6th grade, I remember (better memory than widdle Chrissy) getting tired of writing, “I will not talk in class.” 100 times on the blackboard so just used ditto marks. Teacher wasn’t pleased but let it go. I never had to do that punishment again ;) .
Kiddo’s math teacher would use @ instead of X in multiplication equations. Try as we might, kiddo refused to listen to us that it was wrong. It took the next year’s math teacher to correct it.
I learned something interesting today. Thanks!
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