The Ampersand (&)
Dear all,
We’ve been celebrating English Enrichment this week and in Monday’s assembly we learned about a symbol that we probably see every day; one that many people use very often when sending messages or emails; but one that far fewer people know the name of, let alone where it came from.
The ampersand sits above the number 7 on a British keyboard alongside the symbols for the pound, dollar, percentages, asterisk, hashtag, exclamation mark, and brackets. But where did it come from? Like so many things that have been passed down to us, the answer is the ancient world and, more specifically, the Romans. You will probably know that the Latin word ‘et’ means ‘and’: at some point, Roman scribes began to combine the two letters into one symbol, which is where the ampersand began (though not with that name). One of the earliest surviving examples is a piece of graffiti in Pompeii, preserved after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.
Latin, of course, survived the collapse of the Roman Empire and became the language of the Catholic Church. During the Middle Ages – like so many other words – the way it was written changed, losing any semblance of the original ‘e’ and ‘t’ and coming to look more like the symbol we use today (&).
As more people learned how to read and write during the 18th and 19th Centuries, the ampersand was even added to the alphabet, becoming a sort of 27th letter.
But where does the name ‘ampersand’ come from? Over the centuries, the way children have been taught the alphabet has also changed – you will probably remember how you learned the different letters through rhyme and repetition. When children in the 19th Century were taught the alphabet they had to say ‘per se’ whenever they read a letter that could also be a word on its own. ‘Per se’ means ‘by itself’ in Latin. So, instead of saying A, B, C, D they would say A, per se, B, C, D, and so on. At the end of the alphabet, they would say, X, Y, Z ‘and – per se – and’.
Children would often struggle with this – it came at the end of reciting the alphabet, they tended to be speaking quickly, and it’s not a particularly easy phrase to say. A ‘Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English’ from 1905 gives some of the other pronunciations school children apparently came up with when they got to the end of the alphabet. It reads:
Ampersand. The sign &. Variants: Ann Passy Ann; anpasty; andpassy; anparse; apersie; ampassy; am-passy-ana; ampene-and; ampus-and; ampsyand; ampazad; amsiam; ampus-end; apperse-and; empersiand; amperzed; and zumzy-zan.
Of the many pronunciations that might have stuck, it was “ampersand” which came to be accepted and is now the official name for ‘&’. So, from Roman scribes to school children in the 1800s, that’s where ‘&’ came from.
Have a great weekend.
Best wishes
Michael Bond
