Some punctuation marks quietly do their job and never ask for attention.
Then there’s the ampersand, that ancient squiggle with Roman roots, a brief career as the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet, and a modern life as the show-off of café chalkboards and company logos.
You can be sure that if punctuation marks were dinner guests, the ampersand would be the one who turns up in a velvet jacket, insists on being called ‘&’ and spending the evening trying to look both casual and important whilst the brash and rather vulgar exclamation marks, excluded from the party for being both noisy and overused, look on from outside, their grubby dots pressed up against the windows.
The ampersand is stylish, versatile, a little mysterious-and, like most of our odd little symbols, it has a story that stretches back much further than you might expect.
The ampersand began life as a marriage of two letters: E and T.
In Latin, ‘et’ simply means ‘and’. But, over time, scribes got a bit lazy with their quills (who wouldn’t, after the forty-seventh scroll of the day?) and began looping the letters together into a single squiggle.
By the first century AD, the ‘et’ ligature was popping up across manuscripts, evolving into something curvier, more decorative, and ultimately recognisable as our modern ampersand. So it isn’t just a symbol, it’s a survivor, one born in the scribal equivalent of a staffroom doodle, only to become one of the most iconic marks in written English.
For centuries, the ampersand wasn’t content to be just a flashy extra—it actually enjoyed a place in the alphabet.
Because the alphabet as we know it used to have twenty-seven letters and finish thus.
W, X, Y, Z, &.
Because up until the nineteenth century, children learning their ABCs in both Britain and America would end with ‘…X, Y, Z, and per se, and’. That last phrase, meaning ‘and, by itself, and’, was chanted so often it slurred into a single word: ampersand.
The name stuck, long after the symbol lost its rightful place as the twenty-seventh letter. You can almost hear the indignation, imagine being dropped from the alphabet after centuries of loyal service, only to be remembered as a footnote.
The ampersand is basically the Ringo Starr of punctuation.
These days, it pops up everywhere: company logos, café signs, wedding invitations. It’s become shorthand for elegance, sophistication, and the general sense that whatever it’s joining together is far more exciting than the humble word ‘and’.
‘Smith and Jones’ sounds like a provincial law firm. ‘Smith & Jones’ sounds like a swanky bar in Shoreditch. That’s the power of the ampersand, a typographic makeover at the stroke of a pen.
Not everyone is convinced, of course.
Traditionalists sniff at its overuse, insisting it should be reserved for formal titles and business names. Too many ampersands, they argue, and your writing starts to look like an art school poster. On the other hand, designers adore it; every typeface gives the symbol its own flourish, from the stately Roman & to the positively acrobatic cursive versions.
It’s the one character that allows printers and typographers to really show off, and you can usually tell how much fun a font designer had by the way they draw it.
In the end, the ampersand is proof that even the quirks of language can achieve cult status. What began as a tired scribes shortcut is now a mark of style, personality, and even rebellion. It’s a little curve of history, inked onto café chalkboards and company letterheads alike. So the next time you type ‘&’, remember: you’re not just saving a keystroke, you’re carrying on a two-thousand-year-old tradition.
A squiggle that survived the Romans, conquered the alphabet, and still manages to look impossibly cool.
