The ampersand is an ancient character used to denote “and” in Western languages. It evolved from the Roman ligature for “et” and was treated as a single letter of the alphabet. Its name has no connection to Andre-Marie Ampere. It is commonly used in product names and company partnerships. Its use in conjunction with “and” may indicate collaboration. In archaic usage, it was used in conjunction with other letters or words, such as “&c.” for “et cetera.”
The ampersand is a character used in many Western languages to denote the word e. It is an extremely ancient character, and the ancestor of him can be traced back to the 1st century, where it was used in ancient Roman times. The symbol itself has changed a lot over the years, but similarities can still be seen between the ancient version and the modern version. Many typefaces treat the ampersand as a very graphic typeface, and thus add a great deal of elegance and style. As a character entity in codesets such as HTML, the ampersand is represented by & or &.
In ancient Roman the word et, meaning and was often written in a very narrow form of italics, forming a ligature. As Roman cursive evolved, this basic et became more stylized and began to look more like a modern ampersand. As the Latin script evolved, most of the other letters lost their ligature, but the ampersand kept it and became even more stylized, making it look like just a graphic character, rather than a collection of letters. In fact, the ampersand was for many years treated as a single letter of the alphabet, as the twenty-seventh letter.
There was an ancient tradition of saying per sé, meaning simply da sé before any single letter that stood for a word in its own right, e.g. per sé I or per sé A. The ampersand was treated the same way, described as per se e, which meant that the alphabet was finite: X, Y, Z, and per se e. Over time this became confused into andperseand, and eventually became just the ampersand we all know.
There is also a popular etymology on the origin of the word ampersand, although it seems to have no validity. Some people argue that the symbol was used extensively in Andre-Marie Ampere’s publications, and therefore began to be called Ampere’s and, which was eventually shortened to ampersand. In fact, the term had been around for quite some time before Ampere was born, so this etymology is almost certainly false.
Generally, style guides agree that the ampersand should not be used in normal writing. Historically speaking, however, it has been commonly used in text and when reading old documents the word and is generally replaced by the ampersand in all situations. In the modern world, however, the only place you tend to see it outside of casual writing between acquaintances is in product names or the names of companies and partnerships, such as Mitchell & McDonald.
In some cases, the choice between using the word e and the ampersand actually indicates something. For example, in the credits an ampersand indicates that two people worked closely together, as in two writers collaborating on a screenplay. The word and the spelling indicate that while they may have both worked on a script, they probably didn’t work directly with each other.
In more archaic usage, the ampersand may also have been used in conjunction with other letters or words, in a style similar to modern text speech. The best example of this is the 18th and 19th century contraction of et cetera. In modern writing we often see this abbreviated to simply etc., but in older writing we often see &c. as a further contraction of this, with the ampersand representing the word et.
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