AMPERSAND (U+0026)

This character is part of the Basic Latin unicode block.

Windows info: #38 (keystroke: &)
Macintosh info: #38 (keystroke: &)

Arial Unicode MS family — character map	Bitstream Cyberbit family — character map
Palatino Linotype Italic family — character map	Casual Brush family — character map

The ampersand (&), colloquially called the “and sign”, is one of most lively characters in today’s fonts. The character originated as a ligature of the Latin word “et” (“and”) in the first century A.D. —sources give credit to the invention of the ampersand to Marcus Tullius Tiro, who was a long-time scribe and secretary to Cicero, the famous Roman statesman, philosopher and writer. Originally an all-capitals ligature of “E” and “T”, it assumed a more calligraphic form with the development of the Carolingian minuscule in the late 8th century.

The ampersand remained standard scribal practice throughout the following centuries, gradually changing its form — from a ligature resembling the original letters “et” to a more abstract sign similar to its current shape (“&”). Ever since the invention of movable type in the 15th century, the ampersand was keenly included in type fonts and remained in use by printers and typographers.

In England, & was regarded the 27th letter of the alphabet until the early 20th century. When children enumerated the letters of the alphabet, they would say: “…, x, y, z, and per se and”. From this last phrase, the name “ampersand” was coined.

Currently, the main surviving use of the ampersand is in the formal names of businesses (especially law firms and partnerships), in book and film titles and on other occasions where proper names are listed, especially of couples (e.g. “Adam & Eve”). Typically, the ampersand is used in logos, titles and headlines but not in running text. However, in the Marshallese language, which is spoken on the Marshall Islands in the western Pacific Ocean, & is a separate letter of the alphabet that denotes a vowel (though following recent spelling reforms, the letter ę is used to denote that vowel). In the Unicode Standard, ampersand is encoded as U+0026. In computing, several programming languages use the symbol to denote a reference to a stored item rather than the item itself; and it is used in URLs when variables are submitted in HTML forms.

Some typefaces, especially italic styles, contain highly decorative ampersands that can add visual appeal to any page. In “The Elements of Typographic Style”, Robert Bringhurst writes: “Contemporary offerings [of ampersands in fonts] are for the most part uninspired, stolid pretzels: unmusical imitations of the treble clef. Often the italic font is equipped with an ampersand less repressed than its roman counterpart. Since the ampersand is more often used in display work than in ordinary text, the more creative versions are often the more useful. There is rarely any reason not to borrow the italic ampersand for use with roman text.”

Some OpenType fonts contain several glyph variants for the ampersand — ranging from plain to very swashy designs. Robert Slimbach’s Poetica typeface probably holds a record by including 58 different ampersand glyphs.

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This page shows the selected character in three of the world’s largest fonts: Arial Unicode MS; Bitstream Cyberbit; Palatino Linotype Italic; as well as your chosen font, Casual Brush. Although this section of the site works for all characters defined by the Unicode Consortium, most fonts contain only a small portion of Unicode’s many thousands of characters. You can use Character Details pages to see how a particular character varies its shape among several fonts, or simply to check if your chosen font contains a particular character.

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