The History of the Ampersand – Infographic

With the advent of Social Media, the ampersand gets a real workout. We all use this little symbol “&” to help save on our character counts and tie phrases together. But did you know that it had a much more important role in our language, both written and spoken?

The ampersand was used to help differentiate words and characters, it helped to clarify the statements being written or preached by the clergy. The ampersand symbol is actually a ligature.  A ligature is the connection of two letter forms to create one letter form. In proportionately spaced typefaces where each letterform occupies a different amount of space, ligatures help to regulate the white spaces around words and sentences so they’ll look optically correct. With new age typography this happens automatically within the computer for words that have “tt”, “fl”, “fi”… in them. Ligatures were an invention of the early scribes to save time and ink, and were adopted by the early lead typesetters of the 1600’s to aid in the layout of broadsides and playbills.

In the first century scribes would use a grouping of words starting and ending with the word “and,” in it’s latin form is “et”, scribes would place it near a single character word, like “a,” to indicate that it was the word form and not the letter form.  The latin word for “and” is “et” and it would be off set from the word “a” with the latin saying “per-se” which means “by-itself,” this combination of words would often result in the scribe writing out the words “et per-se et” or pronounced phonically as “and per-se and” which then quickly became truncated and mushed together to be “ampersand”

For your edification I submit the following, history of the “&” AKA ampersand:

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