"That's a great deal to make one word mean," Alice said in a thoughtful tone. "When I make a word do a lot of work like that," said Humpty Dumpty, "I always pay it extra."

Saturday 5 December 2009

Ampersand

&

The ampersand is a punctuation mark (&) used to represent the conjunction ‘and’.

Alrhough it is a substitute for the word 'and' in any context it is not generally used outside of signs and titles.

It is a ligature formed from an upper or lowercase e conjoined with t which spells et (“and” in Latin).

(In writing and typography the word ligature means a character consisting of two or more letters combined into one.)

2 comments:

  1. You. Are. Amazing! I would never have thought to question where that came from, or what it was! Excellent!

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  2. I knew where it came from (et) but I don't think I ever heard the word "ampersand"

    ReplyDelete