Glyph Studies Nº 01 History of the ampersand

And Per Se And

The ampersand began as two letters in a hurry. Two thousand years later it is the only character in your font that had to argue its way into existence — a ligature that ate a word, sat at the end of the alphabet, and refused to leave.

By M. Okafor 14 min read Typeface on this page: Archivo

Hamburgefonstiv — the quick brown fox & the lazy dog, 1837.

Size

Weight

Width

Optical size (serif line)

Click the preview to edit the specimen text. The serif line rides the optical-size axis.

Before it was a character, it was a couple. Sometime in the first century, a Roman scribe writing quickly in ink on papyrus let the e of et — Latin for “and,” the most useful conjunction in the language — flow directly into the t. The crossbar of the t became the little horizontal flick that still survives in formal ampersands; the bowl of the e became the lower loop. You can watch it happen in the graffiti of Pompeii, where hurried hands scratched the pair into walls nearly two millennia before anyone thought to give the result a name.

1.Examples of the et ligature appear in Pompeian cursive and in the wax-tablet handwriting preserved at Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall — some of the oldest surviving everyday Latin handwriting, dated to the first and second centuries.

Ligatures are usually invisible — the fi and fl of this very text are set as single glyphs and you were never meant to notice. The ampersand is the ligature that escaped. By the early Middle Ages, monastic scribes were treating it as a word-sign in its own right; by the nineteenth century, English schoolchildren recited it as the twenty-seventh letter. When they rattled off the alphabet and reached the end, they added, by way of clarification, “and per se and” — “and, by itself, and.” Slur that at classroom speed and you get ampersand. The name is a fossil of the recitation.

The twenty-seventh letter

Victorian primers printed the alphabet with the ampersand at the end, and dictionaries of the period record the phrase and per se and as common schoolroom speech. It did not last. The character was quietly dropped from the alphabet in the late nineteenth century, around the time education reformers standardised the twenty-six-letter song. But by then it had secured a second career: commerce. Partnerships put it between their surnames. Grocers painted it on fascia boards. It meant “and” in a quarter of the width, and brevity has always been the soul of signage.

Type designers have always treated it as a licence. Where the alphabet is a discipline, the ampersand is a day off: it loops, swashes, swells, and occasionally produces forms so free that they read as abstract flourishes until the meaning lands. Eric Gill drew one that looks like a seated figure. The italic ampersands of the French Renaissance punchcutters are practically calligraphy. A typeface can be judged by its ampersand the way a pianist can be judged by a single run — everything about the designer’s hand is in it.

Et, per se

The digital age, which endangered so much typographic furniture, has been kind to the ampersand. It is a logogram in a world that reads quickly; it is the star of programming languages, of brand marks, of hashtags and handles. Unicode gives it code point U+0026, but its real address is the space between two things that belong together. Which is, after all, what it has always meant.

2.Typographers distinguish the old-style italic ampersand (showing the et clearly) from the modern roman form descended from Carolingian cursive. Most contemporary grotesques, including the one you are reading, use the latter.

There is a lesson in it for anyone who draws letters: the character with the least obligation to legibility became the most beloved. Not because rules don’t matter — the ampersand is only charming because the twenty-six letters around it behave — but because every system of letters needs one seat where expression outranks duty. The alphabet keeps that seat warm, at the very end, where it used to sit.