We were arguing about whether to write "Alexander and Amanda" or "Alexander & Amanda" on something boring this week, and that sent us down a rabbit hole about the ampersand. It turns out the squiggly little symbol used to be a full-blown letter of the English alphabet. Children recited it. Schoolbooks listed it. And the name we use for it today is basically a kid mispronunciation that stuck.
For most of the 1800s, American and English schoolchildren learned an alphabet that ended X, Y, Z, &. The ampersand sat right after Z as the 27th character. It wasn't decorative. It was a real letter representing the word "and," the same way "&" still does in a compnay name today. The shape itself is even older. It's a ligature of the Latin word et, which also means "and." If you squint at a fancy italic ampersand you can still see the e and the t tangled together. Roman scribes were writing it that way as far back as the first century. So the symbol predates most of the alphabet we use now, and it spent about 1,800 years being treated as legitimate writing rather than a typographical flourish.
Here's where it gets good. When kids recited the alphabet out loud, any letter that could also be a word on its own (A, I, and &) was preceded by the Latin phrase per se, meaning "by itself." So you'd say "A per se A," then move on. At the end of the alphabet, the recitation finished with "X, Y, Z, and per se and." Say that fast, the way a bored seven-year-old would. And-per-se-and. Ampersand. That's it. That's the whole etymology. The name of the symbol is a slurred classroom chant that got written down as a real word in the 1830s and never left. By the early 1900s the ampersand had quietly dropped off the official alphabet, partly because it wasn't really a letter in any phonetic sense and partly because nobody could agree on what to call it. The name we use now is a fossil of how kids actually talked.
Even after losing letter status, the ampersand stuck around in places where space mattered or formality counted. Law firms loved it because "Smith & Jones" reads as one unit, while "Smith and Jones" reads as two separate names that happen to be next to each other. Newspaper headlines used it to save column width. Logos use it because it's prettier than a three-letter word. And programmers picked it up for entirely new jobs (logical AND, string concatenation, HTML entities) because it was a familiar character looking for work. Not bad for a letter that got kicked out of the alphabet.
If you've got a weird-origin story or piece of typographic trivia we should chase down for a future Friday, send it our way. We're always taking suggestions.
— Alexander & Amanda @ SBATC
