the.com/ampersand
A typographic mashup where Latin's word for and got squeezed into one defiant glyph.
means The symbol & that stands in for the word "and."
from The glyph itself is a ligature — a squashing-together of the letters in the Latin word et, meaning "and," which is why you can sometimes still spot the e and t hiding in its curves. The name is the strange part: in old schoolrooms, when children recited the alphabet, any letter that doubled as a word was tagged with the Latin phrase per se, meaning "by itself." The & sat at the very end of the alphabet, so they'd chant "...X, Y, Z, and per se and" — "and (the character) by itself (means) and." Said quickly and often enough, "and per se and" slurred into the single word ampersand.
- latin origin
- It's the letters e and t fused: et, meaning and
- alphabet's 27th
- Once recited as the final letter after z
- naming logic
- And per se and slurred into ampersand
- ancient design
- Found scrawled in Roman cursive from 79 AD
ampersand house — frank lloyd wright's 1924 design in los angeles with an ampersand-shaped floor plan
ampersand gallery — contemporary art gallery in london's mayfair since 2015, named for the symbol