The Ampersand reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Ampersand

An ampersand (&) is a symbolic abbreviation for and, deriving from a ligature of the letters 'et' (et is Latin for and). This is why 'etc.' can sometimes be seen written as '&c.' The symbol's origin is apparent in the example shown above right; the example on the left, now more common, is a later development.

Historically, & was regarded as the 27th letter of the Latin alphabet. The name derives from and per se and.

It is generally used interchangeably with and. However, in film credits for story, screenplay, etc., & indicates a closer collaboration than and.

For & the English name is ampersand, that is, "and per se and," though the Scottish name epershand, that is, "et, per se and," is more logical and also more clearly shows its origin to be the Latin et, of which it is but the manuscript form.

The ampersand represents a vowel in the orthography for the Marshallese language.

---

The ampersand corresponds to Unicode and ASCII character 38, or hexadecimal 0x0026. On many U.S computer keyboards, the ampersand is found above the 7.

In some computer programming languages, the & sign is used to indicate logical and.

Many computer languages with syntax derived from C differentiate between:

• && for logical and
• & for bitwise and

This is the "Ampersand" reference article from the English Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.