Why the Ampersand Looks Like That

When you see an ampersand, you (hopefully) know that it’s standing in for the word “and” thanks to whoever taught you written language. 

Without that knowledge? Trying to guess based purely on appearance? Good luck. Left to nothing but the strokes on the page, a cursive Q would be a respectable guess. The @ symbol at least does you the kindness of including a letter from the word it’s replacing. An ampersand doesn’t look like much more than a scribe’s untimely sneeze.

Yet, it does have an actual, legitimate purpose for looking the way it does, and wasn’t just pulled off some linguist’s margin doodles to join the rest of our punctuation marks. In its earlier forms, it was easily decipherable from a glance, though over time it gnarled itself into the little knot it is today. It’s had a long time to evolve, too, given that ampersands have been spotted as far back as Pompeiian walls from the first century A.D.

Funnily enough, you may have already seen a strong hint as to the ampersand’s roots if you’ve typed one in certain italic fonts, and had it show up as the character on the left:

Looking at the italic version, it’s a lot easier to extract one if not both relevant characters: E and T. They combine to make the word et, which is Latin for “and.” A word that itself is still kicking around, full-sized, in the phrase et al, meaning “and others.” Between et and at, apparently adding a T to things has, historically, pissed a lot of people off. So the letters in et were smushed into a ligature, a shape made of joined letters, to save people of the past veritable milliseconds. Though I’ll admit if you’re going at marble with a chisel, you’re probably looking to minimize your characters before carpal tunnel sets in.

If the modern ampersand still seems like an unrecognizable jump, this less decorative, sans-serif evolution from ligature to modern punctuation might give you a clearer idea how we got here:

Now, whenever you hit your shift and 7 key in tandem, you will know exactly why it spits out a little curlicue. You live et you learn.