Mid-Week Mini: The Ampersand

In this week’s Mid-Week Mini Episode, we talk about The Ampersand.

You know the ampersand — that curly symbol we use as shorthand for the word “and,” especially in company names like Johnson & Johnson or Barnes & Noble. Today it mostly saves us two letters and occasionally makes a law firm sound more expensive. But for generations of English-speaking schoolchildren, the ampersand was commonly recited at the very end of the alphabet.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, alphabet books and primers sometimes included the ampersand after the letter Z. It wasn’t necessarily considered a 27th letter in exactly the same way as A through Z, but it was included in the sequence children learned. So when some students recited the alphabet, they didn’t stop at “X, Y, Z.” They had one more thing to say.

And what they said is the reason we call it an “ampersand” today.

At the time, when a letter could also function as a word by itself, students sometimes used the Latin phrase “per se,” meaning “by itself,” while reciting the alphabet. For example, the letter A is also the word “a,” so it could be recited as “A, per se, A” — essentially, “A, by itself, is A.” The same convention could be used for the letter I.

The ampersand represented the word “and,” which created a wonderfully strange ending to the alphabet. After Z, students could finish by saying, “and, per se, and.” In other words: the symbol by itself means the word “and.”

Now say “and per se and” quickly.

And-per-se-and.

Ampersand.

Over time, those words ran together. Forms such as “ampassy,” “ampussy,” and eventually “ampersand” appeared in English, and by the 19th century, “ampersand” had become the name of the symbol itself. So the word “ampersand” didn’t start out as the formal name of a punctuation mark — it grew out of generations of people reciting a phrase.

The symbol is much older than the word. It developed from the Latin word “et,” which means “and.” Scribes wrote the letters E and T together as a ligature — two characters combined into a single mark — and over centuries, that handwritten combination evolved into the ampersand we still use.

Eventually, the ampersand disappeared from the alphabet lessons most of us grew up with, and Z became the undisputed end of the line. But the old way of reciting the alphabet left something behind. Every time you say “ampersand,” you’re saying the descendant of “and, per se, and” — a phrase once heard at the end of the ABCs.

And the Internet Says it’s True.