I feel like the first biologist to discover a living coelacanth in modern times. The 7 standing for “and” was used in Old English manuscripts from the Dark Ages, like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. I had no idea it was ever used after the Norman Conquest, and now suddenly you guys come out of the woodwork with it, 900 years after the demise of Old English!
As said, the glyph is used in technical and legal writing.
I have seen the “seven” used for “and”. I’ve also seen a little squiggle that looks like a capital D with the top line extended to the left and the left line extended just above the D, like the figure below if the D were bigger and the squiggle was done in one line. Might be a “quickie” ampersand?
_]
D
Try that again (ignore the dots)…
_]
…D
That D looking glyph you described sounds like the result of writing a plus sign (+) without lifting the pen from the paper.
Here in Colombia, the & is used as a commercial @ sign. I don’t know much more about that.
That makes sense, “plus” has a similar meaning to “and”. But in the written context, the D-glyph seems to be used in the same way as an ampersand (i.e. in business names, etc.)
Thanks for all the replies!
is a real pain… we say ‘number sign’ in Canada, but more and more often hear ‘pound sign’ because of US-based phone-response systems that say ‘press pound’ instead of ‘press number sign’. I suspect that they use it because it’s a short one-syllable exprression that compares nicely to ‘star’ for *.
Of course, the Brits say ‘hash’ for #, but that too is almost unknown in Canada.
Makes for interesting documentation when you are writing for an audience that includes people from Canada, the US, and the UK.
To me, the paragraph sign is the one that looks like a backwards P: ¶. I believe it’s also called the Pilcrow sign.
Just wanted to throw in a little typographic jargon. # has a name, distinct from its meaning (pound, number, whatever). It is called the octothorp. It is typographically different from the sharp sign from music notation, though I don’t remember what the difference is.
The paragraph symbol, ¶, is called a pilcrow.
I want to be a type geek when I grow up, and facts like these make me think I might get there some day (heck, I’m only 41 years old).
I would have expected Spanish would be a rare place to see the ampersand, as their and is a single letter, y.
The # sign is called the “well” sign in Chinese (because it’s shaped like an old-fashioned well; Chinese wells were generally square, with a #-shaped thing over it to aid drawing water), but other than telephones I can’t remember off the top of my head what else it’s used for.
That French thingy isn’t limited to French. Try Portuguese: coração
This is what Wikipedia says of #
"In the United States of America, the symbol is traditionally called the pound sign. It derives from a series of abbreviations for pound avoirdupois, a unit of weight. At first “lb.” was used; later, printers got a special font made up of an “lb” with a line through the ascenders so that the “l” would not be mistaken for a “1”. Unicode character U+2114 (℔) is called the “LB Bar Symbol,” and it is a cursive development of this symbol. Finally came the reduction to two horizontal and two vertical strokes.
Its traditional commercial use in the US was such that when it followed a number, it was to be read as ‘pounds’: 5# of sugar. And when it preceded a number, it was to be read as ‘number’: #2 pencil, which still appears on US pencils. Thus the same character in a printer’s type case had two uses."
Sorry, that smiley that showed up in my post above is clearly because my browser can’t show the LB bar symbol. (Note to self: always use preview!)
I noticed that many Russians, instead of using quotation marks, use << and >>. They’ll also use their version of quotation marks when mentioning commpany names and brands, for instance the <<Mustang>> by auto company <<Ford>>.
There’s a bunch of unusual letterlike symbols deep in Unicode …
℣ ℤ ℥ Ω ℧ ℨ ℩ K Å ℬ ℭ ℮ ℯ ℰ ℱ Ⅎ ℳ ℴ ℵ ℄ ℅ ℆ ℇ ℈ ℉ ℊ ℋ ℌ ℍ ℎ ℏ ℊ ℋ ℌ ℍ ℎ ℏ ℐ ℑ ℒ ℓ ℔ ℕ ℗ ℘ ℙ ℚ ℛ ℜ ℝ ℞ ℟ ℠ ℡
The carat shaped quotation marks are called guillemets. They’re used for quoting single utterances of direct speech in French, whereas dialogue is quoted using dashes. I think in German they point inward, in French they point outward, or something like that.
When I was a kid I always noticed nobody wrote the actual ampersand but replaced it with the cursive plus sign. I just assumed people thought the ampersand was too much trouble to form when trying to write quickly, so they replaced it with something easier and faster. But I had to be the calligraphy geek and taught myself to write elegant ampersands in my handwriting.
I don’t know about anybody else, but on my monitor that resembles an invocation to Cthulhu much more than unusual letterlike symbols from Unicode.
Is anyone familiar with this symbol,
|
Ɛ
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But not quite so large. I use it for ‘and’ along with the ampersand. But I have never seen a Unicode for it. Is it uncommon, or just considered redundant?
AP
As a child I was taught to write a shorthand symbol for “and” that looks like a cross between a lower-case “t” and a “v”. This is just a modification of the ampersand?
According to everything I’ve heard about it, ‘octothorpe’ was coined at Bell Labs specifically to refer to the # on the phone. I’m pretty sure there’s no earlier cite (but would be interested to hear it).
The sharp sign is properly written with straight vertical lines, and the crossing lines slanted upward. This should be it:
♯
The French guillemets are smaller than what elmwood showed. They are « and », not << and >>. As far as I know, you’re correct: French uses « text » while German uses » text «.
More hijacking:
Did anyone see the Washington Post article a couple of months ago about various nations’ names for @? The US is so boring! Other folks call it monkey, streudel, doggy, cat, and so on. I can’t remember the others, and I may have made up cat (not paying to access the Post’s archives). Any help?
Still, wouldn’t it be more fun to give business contacts your address if the conversation went “My address is jomama-streudel-jomama.com.” “Thanks. Mine is blahblah-monkey-blah.net.”? These are the small ways we can save the world.
By the way, Agnostic Pagan, I always use the glyph you mention in handwriting–I remember seeing it as an affectatious teenager and thinking it was cool. It’s just an variation on the ampersand, and you see it sometimes in typefaces. The forms of these analphabetic symbols are mainly up to the whimsy and historical bent of the typographer.
For anyone interested in the orthographics of letterforms and symbols, I heartily recommend Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. There’s an appendix with everything you ever wanted to know about those symbols, but didn’t really care enough to ask.