The ampersand’s legacy has reached far and wide since then, and its multi-faceted origins are still impacting its use to this day.
It’s a shape we know, but what you may not realise is that the form of the ampersand is over 1,500 years older than the word ampersand itself. The ampersand (&) began its life as a literal ligature of the Latin word et (meaning “and”). Ancient Roman scribes often connected the letters “E” and “T” in cursive writing to save time, producing a combined symbol for “and”. In fact, the oldest known example of this et-ligature comes from 1st-century graffiti in Pompeii, where a scrawl on a wall clearly joins the E and T into an early ampersand. By the 4th century, in the flowing New Roman Cursive script, such ligatures were commonplace, and the et-symbol grew more stylised.
Importantly, a parallel “and” sign was also invented in antiquity: Tironian notes, a shorthand system developed by Cicero’s secretary, Marcus Tullius Tiro (~63 B.C.), included a minimal symbol for et, resembling the number seven. This Tironian et (⁊) persisted in some medieval contexts (especially in Irish, Anglo-Saxon, and church texts) as an alternative “and” sign. Interestingly, they’re still used on some Irish road signs to this day! However, the more elaborate ampersand ligature was the form that survived into modern typography.
As the Latin script evolved through late antiquity and the Middle Ages, the ampersand assumed various shapes in different writing styles. During the era of Uncial and Insular scripts (circa 4th–8th centuries), scribes used both the Tironian “7”-like et and the classic ampersand form.
By the Carolingian minuscule of the 8th–9th centuries (a calligraphic standard in the medieval European period), most ligatures were purged for clarity, but “&” remained one of the only allowed ligatures. In beautifully illuminated manuscripts like the Book of Kells (c. 800 AD), one can find the ampersand shape embedded in the Latin text as a graceful contraction of et.
This Carolingian-style ampersand is almost identical to the one we use today. Scribes favoured it not only for tradition but also for practical reasons: using “&” helped compress text to justify lines in manuscript columns.
After 1200, as Gothic textual scripts emerged, the simpler Tironian “&” became more common in vernacular texts, but the ornate ampersand never disappeared. By the Renaissance (c. 15th century), scribes and early humanist writers revived many classical forms – including the ampersand – crafting more calligraphic variants.
Thus, by the late medieval and early Renaissance period, the ampersand existed in two flavours: the traditional Carolingian form (looping and nearly abstract) and more cursive forms that clearly linked a lowercase “e” to “t”.
With the invention of movable type in Europe via Gutenberg in the 1450s, printers eagerly adopted the ampersand. It was included in early typefaces as a standard character – in fact, for centuries, the ampersand was taught as the 27th character of the alphabet in English schools. Children would recite “X, Y, Z, and per se and,” meaning “& by itself is and,” which slurred together to give us the word “ampersand” by 1837!
Early printers used “&” to save space and effort, substituting a single “&” block for the word “and” or “et” made composition more efficient. In the first Roman and italic typefaces of the late 15th and 16th centuries, the ampersand appeared in two forms: a Roman-style ampersand descended from the Carolingian shape, and an italic ampersand that evolved later from cursive scripts.
By the 1700s, the ampersand’s form in type had largely stabilised, echoing its manuscript heritage. Remarkably, modern “&” is essentially the Carolingian design formalised in metal. For Roman fonts, most ampersands retained that classic looped form with an almost “𝑒+𝑡” shape hidden inside. In italic fonts, ampersands were often more flamboyant, sometimes barely resembling et at all, instead looking like a swirling calligraphic figure – a tradition that began in Renaissance chancery scripts. Both legacies are still with us – basically, every Latin typeface includes an ampersand, and it usually comes in either a Roman style or an italic/script style (sometimes both).
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