Ampersands are one of those useful oddities of the English language that one occasionally trips over, especially in older texts. Today it is taken for granted that it is a synonym for the word 'and.' However, much of the personal life of this fine mark has been lost to the modern reader.

The Shape

The ampersand (&) began its life simply enough. It was originally the Latin word Et, which of course is translated into English as 'and'. Note carefully the shape of the character '&' and you will see that resembles a cursive version of the word Et. This is where it all begins. Some lazy or sloppy fellow quickly writes Et in his Latin journal or prayerbook and it ends up looking like '&'.

Later, in the ampersand's quest for meaning, another fellow gets lazy and instead of calling the '&' by its Latin name - Et - he refers to it as 'and'.

In the meantime, the printing press was invented. Those clever typesetters, always looking for another way to save time decided it was easier to use the two letters of Et instead of the three letters of 'and'. But using even two letters meant that two blocks would have to be set up on the press. One printer then thought it would be an even better idea to create a single character block combining the 'E' and the 't,' creating '&'

So this is how the ampersand gained its shape. The next question is, how exactly did the ampersand get its name?

The Name

In America, as in other English-speaking places on the globe, schoolchildren are taught their alphabet by rote. However in 19th-Century America, in addition to the standard 26 letters of the English alphabet, there were also three other characters recited.

The typical recitation would be performed as follows:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z, A per se A, I per se I, & per se &.

The purpose of these odd repetitions of the letters 'A' and 'I' was to point out to school children that each of these two letters could stand as separate words, per se. The '& per se &' was a reference to the ampersand standing as a single character. From this recitation the words 'and per se and' were eventually slurred together 'andpersand'- and the ampersand got its name.