& (per se and)

In the early 1800s, English-speaking schoolchildren recited the alphabet with 27 characters, not 26. After Z came &, the symbol for "and." When a letter was also a word — like the letter I or the letter A — students said "per se" (Latin for "by itself") before it to clarify: "A per se A" meant "the letter A, which is itself a word." The same applied to the last character: "& per se and" meant "the symbol &, which is itself the word 'and.'"

Children slurred "and per se and" into a single rushed word: ampersand. By the 1830s, the slurred pronunciation had become the official name. Dictionaries recorded it. The 27th letter was demoted from the alphabet around the same time, but its garbled name survived the eviction.

The symbol itself is far older than its English name. It originated as a ligature of the Latin word et (and), with the E and T fused into a single glyph. Roman scribes in the 1st century CE were already writing ligatures that evolved into the modern &. In some italic typefaces, you can still see the ghost of the E and T if you look closely.

Marcus Tullius Tiro, Cicero's secretary and the inventor of an early shorthand system around 63 BCE, is often credited with popularizing the et ligature. Whether Tiro created the specific glyph or merely standardized it, the ampersand descends from the practical needs of Roman clerks who wrote faster than they could spell out every conjunction.