The & symbol started as a shorthand way of writing the Latin word “et,” meaning “and.” Roman scribes linked the letters E and T together into a single stroke, creating what typographers call a ligature. The oldest known example was found in the ruins of Pompeii, placing its origin at least as far back as the first century CE.
A Roman Shortcut That Stuck
In everyday Roman handwriting, speed mattered. Scribes naturally blended the two letters of “et” into one connected shape, and over time that combined form became a recognizable symbol on its own. If you look at certain ampersand designs today, especially in italic typefaces, you can still see the ghost of a lowercase E and T fused together.
Around the same period, a separate shorthand system offered its own version. In the first century BCE, a man named Marcus Tullius Tiro, who worked as secretary to the Roman orator Cicero, developed an extensive shorthand method. His symbol for “et” looked nothing like the E-T ligature. This alternative, called the Tironian et, resembles a small numeral 7 or a reversed lowercase r. It dominated German manuscripts for centuries and is still used in Ireland today on public signage, road signs, and even manhole covers, where it stands for “agus,” the Irish word for “and.”
How the Shape Changed Over Centuries
As handwriting styles evolved across medieval Europe, most ligatures fell out of fashion. The et ligature was an exception. It survived and kept mutating. By the time Carolingian minuscule became the standard script in the ninth century, the symbol had grown so stylized that most people could no longer see the original E and T inside it. The ampersand you see in most modern fonts is virtually identical to the form that crystallized during that Carolingian period, more than a thousand years ago.
Different typographic traditions shaped the symbol in different directions. Some versions leaned into the decorative, with elaborate loops and curves. Others stripped it down to something closer to a plus sign with a tail. The variation is wider than almost any other common punctuation mark, which is partly why type designers treat it as a place to show off personality in a font.
When It Was the 27th Letter
For a long stretch of history, the ampersand wasn’t just a symbol. It was taught as the final letter of the alphabet. Schoolchildren in English-speaking countries recited their ABCs all the way through Z and then added & at the end. This practice persisted well into the 1800s.
That classroom tradition is also where the word “ampersand” comes from. Starting in the late Middle Ages, any single letter that doubled as a word got a special label using the Latin phrase “per se,” meaning “by itself.” The letter I, for instance, was recited as “I per se, I,” clarifying that you meant the letter, not the pronoun. When students reached the & at the end of the alphabet, they said “and per se, and,” meaning “the symbol & by itself is the word ‘and.'” Say “and per se and” quickly a few hundred times across a few hundred years, and it slurs into “ampersand.” By the mid-nineteenth century, that slurred version had become the official English name for the symbol.
Why You Still See It Everywhere
The ampersand never faded the way other old ligatures did, partly because it fills a genuine need. It’s compact, saving space in tight layouts like logos, headlines, and business names. “Johnson & Johnson” reads differently from “Johnson and Johnson.” The symbol carries a visual punch that the spelled-out word doesn’t, which is why branding and design have kept it alive long after it lost its spot in the alphabet.
In programming and computing, the symbol took on entirely new roles. It serves as an operator in several coding languages, a separator in web URLs, and a special character in markup languages like HTML. None of these uses have anything to do with the Latin word “et,” but they’ve guaranteed that a symbol born in ancient Roman handwriting remains one of the most frequently typed characters in the world.
So the next time you tap that & key, you’re using a piece of writing technology that a Roman scribe would recognize, filtered through medieval monks, Victorian schoolchildren, and modern programmers, all because someone two thousand years ago got tired of writing two letters when one stroke would do.