| Ampersand | |
|---|---|
| & | |
| ﹠, ⅋, ＆, 🙰, 🙱, 🙲, 🙳, 🙴, 🙵 | |
| Usage | |
| Writing system | Latin script |
| Type | Logographic andIdeographic |
| Language of origin | Latin language |
| In Unicode | U+0026 |
| Lexicographic position | (27) |
| History | |
| Development | |
| Time period | c. 100 CE to present |
| Descendants | • ⅋ |
| Sisters | Greek letterϗ (ligature ofκ,α andι similarly to &) Armenian letterև (ligature ofե andւ, pronounced/jɛv/; եւ is theArmenian word for "and"); Sindhi letter, ۽ |
| Transliterations | plus sign, + |
| Variations | ﹠, ⅋, ＆, 🙰, 🙱, 🙲, 🙳, 🙴, 🙵 |
| Other | |
| Associated graphs | &C (etC) |
| Writing direction | Left-to-Right |
Theampersand, also known as theand sign, is thelogogram&, representing theconjunction "and". It originated as aligature of the letters of the wordet (Latin for "and").[1]
Ampersand: the sign&; the name being acorruption of 'andper se = and'; i.e. '& by itself = and'. The sign derives from the scribes'ligature for theLatin:et; in certain italic versions, the letterse andt are clearly distinguishable.
— Geoffrey Glaister,Glossary of the Book[2]
Traditionally in English, when spelling aloud, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself ("A", "I", and "O") was referred to by theLatin expressionper se ('by itself'), as in "per se A" or "Aper se A".[3][4][5] The character &, when used by itself as opposed to more extended forms such as&c., was similarly referred to as "andper se and".[6][7] This last phrase was routinely slurred to "ampersand", and the term had entered common English usage by 1837.[4][8][9]
It has beenfalsely claimed thatAndré-Marie Ampère used the symbol in his widely read publications and that people began calling the new shape "Ampère's and".[10]
The ampersand can be traced back to the 1st century AD and the oldRoman cursive, in which the letters E and T occasionally were written together to form aligature (Evolution of the ampersand – figure 1). In the later and more flowing New Roman Cursive, ligatures of all kinds were extremely common; figures 2 and 3 from the middle of 4th century are examples of how the et-ligature could look in this script. During the later development of the Latin script leading up toCarolingian minuscule (9th century) the use of ligatures in general diminished. The et-ligature, however, continued to be used and gradually became more stylized and less revealing of its origin (figures 4–6).[11]
The modernitalic type ampersand is a kind of "et" ligature that goes back to the cursive scripts developed during theRenaissance. After the advent ofprinting in Europe in 1455, printers made extensive use of both the italic and Roman ampersands. Since the ampersand's roots go back to Roman times, many languages that use a variation of theLatin alphabet make use of it.
The ampersand often appeared as a character at the end of the Latin alphabet, as for example inByrhtferð's list of letters from 1011.[12] Similarly,& was regarded as the 27th letter of theEnglish alphabet, as taught to children in the US and elsewhere. An example may be seen in M. B. Moore's 1863 bookThe Dixie Primer, for the Little Folks.[13] In her 1859 novelAdam Bede,George Eliot refers to this when she makes Jacob Storey say: "He thought it [Z] had only been put to finish off th' alphabet like; though ampusand would ha' done as well, for what he could see."[14] The popular nursery rhymeApple Pie ABC finishes with the lines "X, Y, Z, and ampersand, All wished for a piece in hand".
InIrish andScottish Gaelic, the character⁊ (U+204A ⁊TIRONIAN SIGN ET) is used in place of the ampersand. This character is a survival ofTironian notes, amedievalshorthand system. This character is known as the Tironian Et in English, theagus in Irish, and theagusan in Scottish Gaelic.
Thelogical conjunction symbol,∧, is often pronounced "and," but is not related to the ampersand.
In everydayhandwriting, the ampersand is sometimes simplified in design as a large lowercaseepsilonƐ or a reversed numeral3, superimposed by a vertical line.[15] The ampersand is also sometimes shown as an epsilon with a vertical line above and below it or a dot above and below it.[15]
Theplus sign+ (itself based on an et-ligature[16]) is often informally used in place of an ampersand, sometimes with an added loop and resemblingɬ.[citation needed] Other times it is a single stroke with a diagonal line connecting the bottom to the left side. This was a version of shorthand for ampersand, and the stroke economy of this version provided ease of writing for workers while also assuring the character was distinct from other numeric or alphabetic symbols.
Ampersands are commonly seen in business names formed from a partnership of two or more people, such asJohnson & Johnson,Dolce & Gabbana,Marks & Spencer andTiffany & Co, as well as some abbreviations containing the wordand, such asAT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph),A&P (supermarkets),P&O (originally "Peninsular and Oriental", shipping and logistics company),R&D (research and development),D&B (drum and bass),D&D (Dungeons & Dragons),R&B (rhythm and blues),B&B (bed and breakfast), andP&L (profit and loss).[17][18]
Infilm credits for stories,screenplays, etc.,& indicates a closer collaboration thanand. The ampersand is used by theWriters Guild of America to denote two writers collaborating on a specific script, rather than one writer rewriting another's work. In screenplays, two authors joined with& collaborated on the script, while two authors joined withand worked on the script at different times and may not have consulted each other at all.[19][20] In the latter case, they both contributed enough significant material to the screenplay to receive credit but did not work together. As a result, both & andand may appear in the same credit, as appropriate to how the writing proceeded.
InAPA style, the ampersand is used when citing sources in text such as (Jones & Jones, 2005). In the list of references, an ampersand precedes the last author's name when there is more than one author.[21] (This does not apply toMLA style, which calls for the "and" to be spelled.[22])
The phraseet cetera ("and the rest"), usually written asetc. can be abbreviated&c. representing the combinationet +c(etera).
The ampersand can be used to indicate that the "and" in a listed item is a part of the item's name and not a separator (e.g. "Rock, pop, rhythm & blues and hip hop").[citation needed]
The ampersand may still be used as an abbreviation for "and" in informal writing regardless of how "and" is used.
The character exists in many computer character sets, usually at 38 (26hex) fromASCII.Unicode provides the following variants:
The last six of these are carryovers from theWingdings fonts, and are meant only for backward compatibility with those fonts.
On theQWERTYkeyboard layout, the ampersand is⇧ Shift+7. It is almost always available on keyboard layouts, sometimes on⇧ Shift+6 or⇧ Shift+8. On theAZERTY keyboard layout,& is an unmodified keystroke, positioned aboveA.
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In the 20th century, following the development offormal logic, the ampersand became a commonly used logical notation for thebinary operator orsentential connectiveAND. This usage was adopted in computing.
Many languages with syntax derived fromC, includingC++,Perl,[23] and more differentiate between:
& forbitwise AND(4 & 2) is zero,(4 & 5) is 4.&& forshort-circuitlogical AND(4 && 2) is true.[a]InC,C++,[24] andGo,[25] a prefix& is a unary operator denoting theaddress in memory of the argument, e.g.&x, &func, &a[3].
InC++ andPHP, unary prefix& before aformal parameter of afunction denotespass-by-reference.[26][27]
InPascal, the& as the first character of an identifier prevents the compiler from treating it as a keyword, thusescaping it.
InFortran, the ampersand forces the compiler to treat two lines as one. This is accomplished by placing an ampersand at the end of the first line and at the beginning of the second line.[28]
In many implementations ofALGOL 60 the ampersand denotes the tens exponent of a real number.[citation needed]
InCommon Lisp, the ampersand is the prefix for lambda list keywords.[29]
Ampersand is thestring concatenation operator in manyBASIC dialects,AppleScript,Lingo,HyperTalk, andFileMaker.[citation needed] InAda it applies to all one-dimensional arrays, not just strings.[citation needed]
BASIC-PLUS on theDECPDP-11 uses the ampersand as a short form of the verbPRINT.[citation needed]
Applesoft BASIC used the ampersand as an internal command, not intended to be used for general programming, that invoked amachine language program in the computer'sROM.[citation needed]
In some versions of BASIC, unary suffix & denotes a variable is of typelong, or 32bits in length.[citation needed]
The ampersand was occasionally used as a prefix to denote ahexadecimal number, such as&FF for decimal 255, for instance inBBC BASIC.[citation needed] (The modern convention is to use "x" as a prefix to denote hexadecimal, thusxFF.) Some other languages, such as theMonitor built into ROM on theCommodore 128, used it to indicateoctal instead, a convention that spread throughout the Commodore community and is now used in theVICE emulator.[30]
InMySQL,& has dual roles. As well as a logical AND, it serves as the bitwise operator of an intersection between elements.[31]
Dyalog APL uses ampersand similarly toUnix shells, spawning a separategreen thread upon application of a function.[citation needed]
In more recent years, the ampersand has made its way into theHaskell standard library, representing flippedfunction application:x & f means the same thing asf x.[32]
Perl uses the ampersand as asigil to refer to subroutines:
In theXbase family of languages, which includesdBase andFoxPro, a singe ampersand signifies macro substitution (where elements of program code are stored in a variable for evaluation at run time). A pair of consecutive ampersands marks the start of an in-line comment.[36][37]
In MASM 80x86 Assembly Language,& is the Substitution Operator, which tells the assembler to replace a macro parameter or text macro name with its actual value.[38]
Ampersand is the name of a reactive programming language, which usesrelation algebra to specifyinformation systems.[39]
InSGML,XML, andHTML, the ampersand is used to introduce anSGML entity, such as (for non-breaking space) orα (for the Greek letter α). The HTML and XML encoding for the ampersand character is the entity&.[40] This can create a problem known asdelimiter collision when converting text into one of these markup languages. For instance, when putting URLs or other material containing ampersands into XML format files such asRSS files the & must be replaced with & or they are considered not well formed, and computers will be unable to read the files correctly. SGML derived the use fromIBM Generalized Markup Language, which was one of many IBM-mainframe languages to use the ampersand to signal a text substitution, eventually going back toSystem/360 macro assembly language.
In the plainTeXmarkup language, the ampersand is used to marktabstops. The ampersand itself can be applied in TeX with\&. TheComputer Modern fonts replace it with an "E.T." symbol in thecmti# (text italic) fonts, so it can be entered as{\it\&} in running text when using the default (Computer Modern) fonts.[41]
InMicrosoft Windows menus, labels, and other captions, the ampersand is used to denote the next letter as a keyboard shortcut (called an "Access key" by Microsoft).[42] For instance setting a button label to"&Print" makes it display asPrint and forAlt+P to be a shortcut equivalent to pressing that button. A double ampersand is needed in order to display a real ampersand. This convention originated in the first WIN32 api, and is used inWindows Forms,[42] (but not WPF, which uses underscore_ for this purpose) and is also copied into many other toolkits on multiple operating systems. Sometimes this causes problems similar to other programs that fail to sanitize markup from user input, for instanceNavision databases have trouble if this character is in either "Text" or "Code" fields.
Some Unix shells use the ampersand as ametacharacter:
Some Unix shells, like thePOSIX standardsh shell, use an ampersand toexecute a process in the background and to duplicatefile descriptors.
The genericURL (Uniform Resource Locator) syntax allows for aquery string to be appended to a file name in a web address so that additional information can be passed to a script; thequestion mark, or query mark,?, is used to indicate the start of a query string.[44] A query string is usually made up of a number of differentname–value pairs, each separated by the ampersand symbol,&. For example,http://www.example.org/list.php?order=ascending&year=2025. A "real" ampersand must be replaced by%26 to avoid interpretation as this syntax.
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