The Language Magpie {The Ampersand}

Last week I was in Hobbycraft on the hunt for some autumn bits and bobs, and spotted their new range of copper wire letters. Thinking our initials would make a nice addition to our downstairs toilet (which is finally nearly finished!) I picked up a letter 'D', but in the absence of an 'E', I changed my mind and bought an ampersand. Cute isn't it!

The ampersand has become something of a household accessory staple. Most homeware collections seem to include this piece of punctuation among their range - cushions, candles, mugs and various other decorative objects - but I wonder how many people have actually thought about what the curly little symbol means apart from being a stylised alternative to the word 'and'.

So, this weeks The Language Magpie will be exploring just that...

Although it has always been interchangeable with the word 'and', the '&' character itself came about before the name 'ampersand.' When writing in Latin, the word 'et' (you know, as in 'et al') became blurred by hasty penmanship and slowly something similar to the symbol we use today began to emerge.

I couldn't work out how 'et' could become '&' until I saw this image, but you can definitely see how hurried writing would start to blur the letters, and even now, many people use a curly capital 'E' intersected by a vertical line (not so far removed from a lower case 't') to indicate the word 'and.'

The name for this character, 'ampersand,' may seem a completely nonsensical words to use, aside from the last three letters. But just like the character, the word itself has evolved because we are apparently not only last writers, but lazy speakers too... 

The '&' symbol used to be a character of the alphabet, and appeared at the very end of the sequence of letters, directly after 'Z.' When reciting the alphabet, Roman's would repeat '...W, X, Y, Z and per-se and' to refer to the curly little symbol which everyone knew to mean 'and'.

 Knowing this, it's much easier to see how 'and per-se and' became squeezed into the the word 'ampersand'

Also, something I hadn't seen until I started reading about this topic is the ampersand combined with the letter 'C' used to further abbreviate 'etc.' 'Etc' is often written at the end of a list or sentence to imply that there is more information, but it is perhaps to too obvious or lengthy to include and the items that have come before it are sufficient to explain the point. It itself is an abbreviation of 'et cetera' which in latin means, 'and so-forth'. So, the '&' would take on it's original meaning and replace the 'et', meaning a list could read something like 'coats, gloves, hats, scarfs, &c.' I don't know about you but I'm but I think even now I know this, I would still probably assume it was a typo if this cropped up in something I was reading. 

For me anyway, the ampersand has always made me think of a partnership that is stronger and more succinct than just 'and.' Maybe that's because there are so many 'Mr & Mrs' type products available these days, but I've always thought of it as a representation of two things than can be neatly represented as one. For this reason, we used a large wooden ampersand in our engagement photoshoot (which you can read about here if you'd like), and had it on display at our wedding too. Now I know that it came about after the merging of two separate parts, maybe there was some logic behind my understanding of it (or maybe I'm just being hopelessly romantic!) 

Sources for this post:

I also found an interesting piece on why graphic designers love ampersands so much - you can read it here.

1 comment

  1. I use it quite a lot! I do that E crossed by a line... You'll see in my letter, ha! I had absolutely no idea about its origin. Thank you, I really enjoyed reading it! xx