# + and & (and and and) **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [October 30, 2020, 12:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-and-and-and/924307 "2020-10-30T12:13:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2020, 12:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-and-and-and/924307/1 "2020-10-30T12:13:55Z")
And And And OK, this is pretty pointless, but it keeps popping up in my head, so I’ll put it here. When I was a kid, I thought the _ampersand_ (&) was a pretty weird thing. It showed up in print all the time in place of the word “and”. It had a weird name with too many syllables in it. It was one of those characters that they didn’t teach you how to make when they taught you your numbers and letters, and I didn’t know anybody who actually wrote that symbol in Real Life. It looked kind of, but not quite, like a G-clef in music ( [Clef - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clef) ) (Tom Weller points out the similarity, amusingly, in his wonderful book _CVLTVRE MADE STVPID_). If I tried to make an ampersand, I ended up drawing a sort of bad capital “S”. What people _did_ use, in everyday life, as an abbreviation for _and_ was a plus sign, but often made in an odd way. I don’t know about you (although I suspect you do it the same way), but I was taught to make a “plus” sign by first drawing the vertical stroke with a downward motion, then, lifting my pen or pencil, to make the horizontal stroke from left to right. What I saw my mother do, when making her “and” sign was to basically draw a “plus” sign this way, but without lifting her pen. So you ended up with what looked like a plus sign with a little extra curl in the upper left quadrant. It looked like this: [![](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand#/media/File:Ampersand_Handwriting_2.jpg) ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand#/media/File:Ampersand_Handwriting_2.jpg) Flash forward several years. I’m doing background research for a historical article I’m researching, and I’m going through late seventeenth and early eighteenth century documents (actually, I’m mostly looking at microfilms and photostats of these documents, but I got to hold a few real ones in my gloved hands). The documents are filled with abbreviations, especially “and”. From the way they drew them, they appeared to be the wat my mom made her “plus” sign in the not-lift-from-the-paper method, so they have that upper-left-quadrant curl in them. But I start to notice something peculiar. These aren’t exactly like plus signs, because the return “up” stroke doesn’t exactly go straight up along the downward stroke, but veer off to the left. The resulting figure doesn’t exactly look like a “plus sign plus curl”, but like an “ampersand on its side”, as if someone gave a standard upright ampersand a violent shove from the right side that pushed it onto its convex left side and now, like an upturned turtle, the ampersand couldn’t get up. I suddenly realize that _this_ is how an ampersand is properly drawn. You don’t draw a misshapen “S” You make the motions of a “plus sign” without lifting your pen from the paper, and you draw it rotated from the way a print ampersand looks if rotated almost ninety degrees counter-clockwise. I thought I had finally solved the Mystery of the Ampersand. The ampersand and the plus sign are basically the same. Only, when I looked into the history of the ampersand, it seems the accepted version is different. The ampersand (whose name comes from “and _per se_”, in essence) is a corrupted form of the latin word “et”, the letters connected by a ligature. Of course, the “plus” sign itself is apparently derived from “et”, as well, but the lineages seem to be distinct. The plus sign results from basically eliminating the “e”, while the ampersand is the result of an evolutionary process that incorporates both letters, which is why the typeface ampersand retains that curl that the plus sign lacks. > **[Ampersand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand#/media/File:Historical_ampersand_evolution.svg)** > > Pages for logged out editors learn more > > > The ampersand, also known as the and sign, is the logogram &, representing the conjunction "and". It originated as a ligature of the letters et—Latin for "and". > The term ampersand is a corruption of and (&) per se and, which literally means "(the character) & by itself (is the word) and." The symbol & is derived from the ligature of ET or et, which is the Latin word for "and." Still, I can’t help thinking that there’s a closer relationship between the ampersand and the casual “plus-as-and-with-the-curl” than the accepted histories imply. > **[Ampersand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand)** > > Pages for logged out editors learn more > > > The ampersand, also known as the and sign, is the logogram &, representing the conjunction "and". It originated as a ligature of the letters et—Latin for "and". > The term ampersand is a corruption of and (&) per se and, which literally means "(the character) & by itself (is the word) and." The symbol & is derived from the ligature of ET or et, which is the Latin word for "and." See pp. 229+ (or 229 &): > **[A History Of Mathematical Notations Vol I : Cajori, Florian : Free Download,...](https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.200372/page/n247/mode/2up)** > > Book Source: Digital Library of India Item 2015.200372dc.contributor.author: Cajori, Floriandc.date.accessioned: 2015-07-09T11:59:38Zdc.date.available:... ---
**Author:** ![WOOKINPANUBv.2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wookinpanubv.2/32/3260_2.png) [@WOOKINPANUBv.2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WOOKINPANUBv.2)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2020, 1:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-and-and-and/924307/2 "2020-10-30T13:05:23Z")
I don’t know about any of that, but I draw them like a capital E with a vertical line down the middle. Doesn’t everyone? I mean, unless you’re doing a proper “&”. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2020, 1:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-and-and-and/924307/3 "2020-10-30T13:12:55Z")
Evidently not – I never did that, nor anyone I know. The Wikipedia article on “ampersand” shows that variation, saying that it originated from an “epsilon” with a spike through it, another variation on the “et” with ligature ---
**Author:** ![Rebo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rebo/32/13005_2.png) [@Rebo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rebo)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2020, 1:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-and-and-and/924307/4 "2020-10-30T13:44:21Z")
I make mine like this, but with the vertical line going all the way through: [![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Epsilon_Ampersand.png) ](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Epsilon_Ampersand.png) ---
**Author:** ![Jumpbass](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jumpbass/32/147_2.png) [@Jumpbass](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jumpbass)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2020, 2:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-and-and-and/924307/5 "2020-10-30T14:07:24Z")
I do that too, but a mirror image. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2020, 2:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-and-and-and/924307/6 "2020-10-30T14:12:56Z")
As you describe, because it’s easy to do. Never learned to produce anything like a ‘&’. Seems there ought to be some ‘official’ way to draw that character in cursive, but I haven’t written in cursive since I was a child, except for my signature, and that’s hardly a recognized writing style. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2020, 2:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-and-and-and/924307/7 "2020-10-30T14:27:57Z")
Your post about kitties appears to show an image with two distinct forms of ampersand in close proximity: [![](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b3/b9/3e/b3b93e9846e19946460dd99af53e98f6.jpg) ](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b3/b9/3e/b3b93e9846e19946460dd99af53e98f6.jpg) Eg look at the line “[argen]tum et aurum et dona. Et alios misit” The capital and lower-case "et"s look different! ---
**Author:** ![Dead\_Cat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/9fc29f/32.png) [@Dead\_Cat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dead_Cat)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2020, 3:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-and-and-and/924307/8 "2020-10-30T15:08:44Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > I don’t know about you (although I suspect you do it the same way), but I was taught to make a “plus” sign by first drawing the vertical stroke with a downward motion, then, lifting my pen or pencil, to make the horizontal stroke from left to right. > > What I saw my mother do, when making her “and” sign was to basically draw a “plus” sign this way, but without lifting her pen. So you ended up with what looked like a plus sign with a little extra curl in the upper left quadrant. It took me a while to work this out, but I got there in the end - I was thinking if you wanted to make a + sign without lifting your pen as you describe, why return to the top after the vertical stroke? Just move from the bottom to the left, so you end up with a loop in bottom left quadrant. I was never taught to write an ampersand by hand either, but I found it easy to learn - start at the bottom right and draw an 8, except just before the end, cross over your first line instead of joining the loop. Quicker and easier than the upper case E with a vertical line through it. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2020, 3:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-and-and-and/924307/9 "2020-10-30T15:14:10Z")
I never thought of that as a plus sign: I always thought it was an upside down (and sometimes backwards) 4. I just assumed people did it because drawing the real thing was hard. Just like I see so many variations on lowercase zeta (used in math). ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2020, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-and-and-and/924307/10 "2020-10-30T16:38:50Z")
To me the epsilon with separate vertical line is pretty much the only way to do a handwritten one. Though I recall doing (or being taught) a malformed plus that starts at the bottom, goes upward vertically, then makes a left = counterclockwise 270 degree turn and proceeds horizontally rightward across the middle of the vertical stroke before ending. The formal “official” clef-like ampersand is not a symbol I’ve _ever_ drawn by hand. I’d make a hash of it even trying. I instantly recognize one (of course), but if you asked me to describe it turn by turn right now without looking at one I’d fail. Despite having just read this whole thread about them & seen bunches of examples. Including the one on the shift-7 key of every keyboard I’ve stared at for decades. IOW, to me the ampersand is sort of like a Chinese character I’ve learned to recognize. It’s a holistic arbitrary icon that I can’t see the internal structure of. It just is. Cognition is weird. ---
**Author:** ![Dinsdale](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/97f17d/32.png) [@Dinsdale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dinsdale)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2020, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-and-and-and/924307/11 "2020-10-30T16:58:27Z")
Yeah - that’s the way I wrote my “ands” - upside down closed 4. I remember when I first encountered a periodical called "Ampersand - was the first time I knew the name to the symbol. I read a book on type fonts a while back, and they had a chapter about how font designers go nuts w/ the ampersands. ---
**Author:** ![JohnGalt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johngalt/32/184_2.png) [@JohnGalt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnGalt)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2020, 6:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-and-and-and/924307/12 "2020-10-30T18:54:05Z")
Drawing an ampersand is easy for me, since it’s used often in programming languages (and I write on a whiteboard in my classes). I rarely ask my students to handwrite code anymore, but when they did they had lots of variations of &. I discuss the origins of & in my classes. What helps is to go into Word and type the &. Then change the fonts, many of which clearly show the ET origins. ---
**Author:** ![chappachula](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/d2c977/32.png) [@chappachula](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chappachula)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2020, 7:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-and-and-and/924307/13 "2020-10-30T19:40:04Z")
A little off topic, but I have a question about the ampersand symbol: Why the hell does it exist? The ampersand does nothing to improve the text, for either the writer or the reader. It is unnecessarily complex to draw, complicating the work of a scribe, and it adds nothing to help the reader’s comprehension of the text. The word “and” is only 3 letters long. Who needs an abbreviated symbol to replace it?. Even back in the days when manuscripts were written painstakingly on parchment by monks. And in the original Latin, the word “et” is even shorter and more convenient to write and read than the ampersand symbol. Lots of other scribal techniques faded away over time.( For example, in the US constitution: an “f”-shaped symbol was used for the letter “s”, diphthongs like “ae” were written differently.) So why did the ampersand survive for centuries? ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2020, 8:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-and-and-and/924307/14 "2020-10-30T20:06:00Z")
> [@chappachula](#): > > A little off topic, but I have a question about the ampersand symbol: > Why the hell does it exist? I don’t know about you, but I’m a lazy bastard, and I find it a lot easier (and more legible, given my handwriting) to write my plus-sign-ampersand than to write out “and”. Saves me two characters ---
**Author:** ![Eyebrows\_0f\_Doom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eyebrows_0f_doom/32/3119_2.png) [@Eyebrows\_0f\_Doom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eyebrows_0f_Doom)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2020, 8:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-and-and-and/924307/15 "2020-10-30T20:14:40Z")
I’ve always written the “and” symbol like the one second from the right here that looks like a plus sign with a line connecting the left and bottom: [![](https://amperart.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ampsnd-to-plus.png) ](https://amperart.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ampsnd-to-plus.png) ---
**Author:** ![Kron](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kron/32/12444_2.png) [@Kron](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kron)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2020, 5:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-and-and-and/924307/16 "2020-10-31T05:13:15Z")
Huh, I use two variations-. The busted figure-8 (&) or an epsilon with a dot above and below. ---
**Author:** ![Patty\_O\_Furniture](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/96bed5/32.png) [@Patty\_O\_Furniture](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Patty_O_Furniture)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2020, 6:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-and-and-and/924307/17 "2020-10-31T06:40:12Z")
Lexicographer Kory Stamper did an ‘ask the editor’ video about the ampersand, but Merriam Webster spitefully deleted all of her video content when she left. Here it is hosted on another site. [https://www.bilibili.com/video/av10546539/](https://www.bilibili.com/video/av10546539/) ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2020, 5:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-and-and-and/924307/18 "2020-10-31T17:08:48Z")
The “plus sign without lifting the pen” I describe in the OP, as I make it, looks much like the center image. The “and” figure that I find in circa 1700 documents (also described in the OP) looks about midway between the second and third figures from the left – a somewhat compressed ampersand lying almost on its side. ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2020, 2:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-and-and-and/924307/19 "2020-11-01T02:30:23Z")
I love ampersands. Knew a guy who did illustration under the name Ampersand Studios. If he hadn’t snagged that name, I would’ve. So I don’t get lazy or rushed and do a sloppy plus sign. No matter how quick I’m writing, I’ll slow down and draw a classic _ **&** _ … [![](https://images.creativemarket.com/0.1.0/ps/123583/580/386/m1/fpnw/wm0/present-co%C4%8Dpy-.jpg?1402001366&s=f25f2035cada76d43082d16f0d381612) ](https://images.creativemarket.com/0.1.0/ps/123583/580/386/m1/fpnw/wm0/present-co%C4%8Dpy-.jpg?1402001366&s=f25f2035cada76d43082d16f0d381612) ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2020, 2:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-and-and-and/924307/20 "2020-11-01T02:34:45Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > And And And > > OK, this is pretty pointless, but it keeps popping up in my head, so I’ll put it here. > > When I was a kid, I thought the _ampersand_ (&) was a pretty weird thing. It showed up in print all the time in place of the word “and”. It had a weird name with too many syllables in it. It was one of those characters that they didn’t teach you how to make when they taught you your numbers and letters, and I didn’t know anybody who actually wrote that symbol in Real Life. It looked kind of, but not quite, like a G-clef in music ( [Clef - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clef) ) (Tom Weller points out the similarity, amusingly, in his wonderful book _CVLTVRE MADE STVPID_). If I tried to make an ampersand, I ended up drawing a sort of bad capital “S”. > > What people _did_ use, in everyday life, as an abbreviation for _and_ was a plus sign, but often made in an odd way. > > I don’t know about you (although I suspect you do it the same way), but I was taught to make a “plus” sign by first drawing the vertical stroke with a downward motion, then, lifting my pen or pencil, to make the horizontal stroke from left to right. > > What I saw my mother do, when making her “and” sign was to basically draw a “plus” sign this way, but without lifting her pen. So you ended up with what looked like a plus sign with a little extra curl in the upper left quadrant. It looked like this: > [Ampersand - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand#/media/File:Ampersand_Handwriting_2.jpg) > > Flash forward several years. I’m doing background research for a historical article I’m researching, and I’m going through late seventeenth and early eighteenth century documents (actually, I’m mostly looking at microfilms and photostats of these documents, but I got to hold a few real ones in my gloved hands). The documents are filled with abbreviations, especially “and”. From the way they drew them, they appeared to be the wat my mom made her “plus” sign in the not-lift-from-the-paper method, so they have that upper-left-quadrant curl in them. > > But I start to notice something peculiar. These aren’t exactly like plus signs, because the return “up” stroke doesn’t exactly go straight up along the downward stroke, but veer off to the left. The resulting figure doesn’t exactly look like a “plus sign plus curl”, but like an “ampersand on its side”, as if someone gave a standard upright ampersand a violent shove from the right side that pushed it onto its convex left side and now, like an upturned turtle, the ampersand couldn’t get up. > > I suddenly realize that _this_ is how an ampersand is properly drawn. You don’t draw a misshapen “S” You make the motions of a “plus sign” without lifting your pen from the paper, and you draw it rotated from the way a print ampersand looks if rotated almost ninety degrees counter-clockwise. > > I thought I had finally solved the Mystery of the Ampersand. The ampersand and the plus sign are basically the same. > > Only, when I looked into the history of the ampersand, it seems the accepted version is different. The ampersand (whose name comes from “and _per se_”, in essence) is a corrupted form of the latin word “et”, the letters connected by a ligature. Of course, the “plus” sign itself is apparently derived from “et”, as well, but the lineages seem to be distinct. The plus sign results from basically eliminating the “e”, while the ampersand is the result of an evolutionary process that incorporates both letters, which is why the typeface ampersand retains that curl that the plus sign lacks. > > [Ampersand - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand#/media/File:Historical_ampersand_evolution.svg) > > Still, I can’t help thinking that there’s a closer relationship between the ampersand and the casual “plus-as-and-with-the-curl” than the accepted histories imply. > > [Ampersand - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand) > > See pp. 229+ (or 229 &): > [A History Of Mathematical Notations Vol I : Cajori, Florian : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.200372/page/n247/mode/2up) Your suspicion is baseless. _&_ is a ligature of _et_ and that’s all there is to it. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/and-and-and-and/924307.md?page=2)