ampersand

pronunciation

How to pronounce ampersand in British English: UK [ˈæmpəsænd] word uk audio image

How to pronounce ampersand in American English: US [ˈæmpərsænd] word us audio image

Word Origin

ampersand: ampersand: [19] This word for the printed character & is a conflation of the phrase and per se and, literally ‘and by it self and’. This has been variously explained as either ‘the single character “&” signifies and’, or ‘and on its own [that is, as the final character in a list of the letters of the alphabet given in old grammar books and primers], &’. The character & itself is a conventionalized printed version of an abbreviation used in manuscripts for Latin et ‘and’.=> and

ampersand (n.): 1837, contraction of and per se and, meaning "(the character) '&' by itself is 'and' " (a hybrid phrase, partly in Latin, partly in English). The symbol is based on the Latin word et "and," and comes from an old Roman system of shorthand signs (ligatures), attested in Pompeiian graffiti, but not (as sometimes stated) from the Tironian Notes, which was a different form of shorthand, probably invented by Cicero's companion Marcus Tullius Tiro, which used a different symbol, something like a reversed capital gamma, to indicate et. This Tironian symbol was maintained by some medieval scribes, including Anglo-Saxon chroniclers, who sprinkled their works with a symbol like a numeral 7 to indicate the word and. In old schoolbooks the ampersand was printed at the end of the alphabet and thus by 1880s had acquired a slang sense of "posterior, rear end, hindquarters."

1. It all began at apero in the basement of the recently opened ampersand hotel near south kensington tube station .

2. A unique typographic marque was created with an ampersand that can be seen in two ways ; at first as an ampersand , and again as a tilted tea cup .

3. You don 't need the ampersand in front of any of these subroutine invocations , because the subroutine name is already known to the compiler following use .