It was the 27 th alphabet of vision, history of unknown "&"

ByMatthew M

The symbol used in the sense of AND (and)&The official name of "Ampersand"It's called. It is a symbol that is used in various places not only in English but also in Japanese, but its historyBlack Lion BannerIt is unraveling.

The History of the Ampersand - Black Lion Banner - Medium
https://medium.com/black-lion-banner/the-history-of-the-ampersand-c81839171940

typographyOne of the most unique and interesting characters among "ampersand" is "&". Beginning with graffiti written in font designer's sketchbook, it is now commonplace to be able to see ampersands on almost every printed matter, and recently it has been widely used as an avant-garde Those with designs are also beginning to appear.

Because of the diversity of its shape, Ampersand allows font designers to demonstrate creativity freely, making designers' personalities obscure and obscure.UnicodeIt is an ampersand which is classified as "punctuation mark", but it was once made to be the 27th letter of the English alphabet, and "andIt is also a symbol having the same meaning.

ByKristian Bjornard

As with typography, the history of ampersand starts from ancient Rome. In ancient Rome clerks, in order to raise the speed of "character writing" which is his workCursiveWas used. Among them, by combining multiple characters and expressing them as one character, we solve the problem of "time saving" and "visual difficulty caused by visually overlapping specific characters" . I was born at this time, synthesizing multiple characters into one letter "LigatureAnd ampersand is one of the things born in this trend. The ampersand (&) is a ligature of Latin "et (and meaning)".

As the Roman Empire grows, ampersand will be seen in many languages. However, as the language that absorbed the ampersand changes and evolves, it will transform from the original original form to a more stylish form. Some of the modern traditional fonts have ampersand shaped to clearly show the original meaning of "et". In the case of the following four types of fonts, in particular, "Caslon" seems to be well understood as being a ligature of "et".


On the contrary, the modern handwriting style font has many ampersands that combine "E" and "T".


Until the early 1700's, schools throughout England had to say "per se"We frequently used the phrase" "Per se" is a word representing the meaning of "essential" and is used when reading letters that make sense with a single letter such as "A" or "I", for example, children at the time " When I spell the phrase "I invite you" (I will invite you) ", ​​he said that he wrote a letter uttering while saying" Per se i, i, n, v, i, t, e ... ... " . This makes it easy to understand that "i" who first uttered is not a part of the word "invite" but "I (me)" which makes sense as a single unit.

At the same time, "&" was taught as the 27th character in the English alphabet. "It was said that" X, Y, Z and per se and "were being read when reading the alphabet in turn, because" & "was taught as an alphabet coming after" Z "at school. This phrase "and per se and" came to be used as one word, and since then "&" became called "ampersand". After that, by 1837 it also came to appear in the dictionary as the word "AND PASSAND".

ByBarney Moss