Dictionary Definition
ampersand n : a punctuation mark (&) used to
represent conjunction (and)
User Contributed Dictionary
English
Etymology
A contraction of "and per se and", meaning "(the character) '&' by itself is 'and' ", which is how the symbol (&) was originally referred to in English. This formulation is due to the fact that in schools, when reciting the alphabet, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself ("A," "I," "&" and, at one point, "O") was preceded by the Latin expression per se ( for "by itself"). Also, it was common practice to add at the end of the alphabet the "&" sign, pronounced "and". Thus the end of the recitation would be: "X, Y, Z and per se and." This last phrase was routinely slurred to "ampersand" and the term crept into common English usage by around 1837.Pronunciation
- /'
Extensive Definition
An ampersand (&), also
commonly called an " 'and' sign," is a logogram representing the
conjunction
"and". The symbol is a ligature
of the letters in et,
Latin for
"and." Its origin is apparent in the second example in the image to
the left below; the first example, now more common, is a later
development.
Name
The word ampersand is a corruption of the phrase "and per se and", meaning "and [the symbol which] by itself [is] and". The Scots and Scottish English name for & is epershand, derived from "et per se and", with the same meaning.This formulation is because in
schools, when reciting the Alphabet, any
letter that could also be used as a word in itself ("A," "I,"
"&" and, at one point, "O") was preceded by the Latin
expression "per se" (Latin for "by itself"). Also, it was common
practice to add at the end of the alphabet the "&" sign,
pronounced "and". Thus the end of the recitation would be: "X, Y, Z
and per se and." This last phrase was routinely slurred to
"ampersand" and the term crept into common English usage by around
1837.
Through folk
etymology, the word ampersand has sometimes been falsely
interpreted as "Amper's and", giving rise to the notion that the
sign was invented, or at least popularised, by a certain Mr.
Amper.
History
The ampersand symbol has been
found on ancient Roman
sources dating to the first century A.D. During this period the
symbol was a boxy-looking ligature
of the capital letter E and lower case t. Over time the figure became more
curved and flowing, until it came to resemble something like the
right hand figure to the left, often called the "italic"
ampersand.
According to the Online
Etymological Dictionary http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ampersand,
the symbol "comes from an old Roman system of shorthand signs
(ligatures), attested in Pompeiian graffiti, but not (as sometimes
stated) from the Tironian Notes, which was a different form of
shorthand, probably invented by Cicero's companion Marcus Tullius
Tiro, which used a different symbol, something like a reversed
gamma, to indicate et. This Tironian symbol was maintained by some
medieval scribes, including Anglo-Saxon chroniclers, who sprinkled
their works with a symbol like a numeral 7 to indicate the word
and."
By the eighth century AD,
Western calligraphy
was well developed, particularly in forms such as Uncial, Insular
script, and Carolingian
minuscule. The calligraphers made extensive use of the
ampersand because the condensation of a word into a single
character made their work easier. During this time the even more
condensed ampersand, shown above on the left, was developed. It is
often called the "Roman" ampersand.
After the advent of printing in Europe in 1455,
printers made extensive use of both the italic and Roman
ampersands. Every new typeface and font has included its own style
of &. Since the ampersand's roots go back to Roman times, many
languages that use a variation of the Latin
alphabet make use of it.
The ampersand often appeared
as a letter at the end of the Latin
alphabet, as for example in Byrhtferð's list of letters from
1011.
Similarly, & was regarded
as the 27th letter of the English
alphabet. Until recent times the alphabets used by children (in
the USA) terminated not with Z but with & or
related typographic symbols. (An example may be seen in M. B.
Moore's 1863 book The Dixie Primer, for the Little Folks ).
George
Eliot refers to this when she has Jacob Storey say, "He thought
it (Z) had only been put to finish off th' alphabet like; though
ampusand would ha' done as well, for what he could
see".
Writing the ampersand
The conventional ampersand can
be easily drawn by first making the cross stroke a bit farther to
the right than where a common letter begins, shifting the pen to
the center of this stroke, and then following the loop
around.
In everyday handwriting, the ampersand
is sometimes simplified to a backwards 3 superimposed by a vertical
line, like a $
sign, this too seems to be a contraction of the Latin et. Sometimes
it appears as nothing more than a "+" sign, or a t with a loop (a
remnant of a lowercase e). This type of ampersand may actually be a
rendering of the "+" sign, or of the Tironian "et".
These forms are all generally acceptable and recognized, but some
might view them as sloppy or casual. The handwritten ampersand also
looks like ɬ, the
voiceless alveolar lateral fricative symbol.
Despite the symbol's declining
use, it can still be useful when space is limited. Perhaps due to
its increasing rarity, the ampersand is sometimes rendered
incorrectly when drawn by hand. The most common error is to render
the symbol backwards http://www.kibo.com/photos/bad_sign_lettering_1/.
Another mistake that is sometimes made is to draw it as a treble clef
from musical notation.
Usage
The main surviving use of the
ampersand is in the formal names of businesses (especially firms and
partnerships,
particularly law firms,
architectural
firms, and stockbroker
firms). When the ampersand forms part of a registered name
(e.g. Brown & Watson), it should not be replaced with and, as
that would be wrong.
With the growth of mobile phone
usage and text
messaging, the ampersand is gaining new use in SMS language
both as a representation for the word "and" and in rebus form, such as "pl&" in
place of the word "planned".
The ampersand is also often
used when addressing an envelope to a couple: "Mr. & Mrs.
Jones" or "John & Silvia".
The ampersand is also used for
book and movie titles, such as Harry & Tonto, as well, and in
some other proper names.
In these cases, & is interchangeable with the word and; the
distinction between them is mostly aesthetic. However, in film credits for story, screenplay, etc., &
indicates a closer collaboration than and; in screenplays, for
example, two authors joined with & collaborated on the script,
while two authors joined with and worked on the script at different
times and may not have consulted each other at all.
In APA style the
ampersand is used when citing sources in text such as (Jones &
Jones, 2005).
The phrase et cetera ("and
so forth"), usually written as etc. can be abbreviated &c.
representing the combination et + c(etera). This usage is
frequently seen in writings of the 18th and 19th centuries, but is
rare in modern usage.
Computing
In the twentieth century,
following the development of formal
logic, the ampersand became a commonly used logical notation
for the binary
operator or sentential
connective AND.
This usage was adopted in computing.
Programming languages
There are two common uses for
the "&" symbol as a binary operator
in programming
languages: as the logical
AND operator, and as the string
or array concatenation operator. There are also various
idiosyncratic uses of & by various languages, for example as a
short form of the verb PRINT in BASIC-PLUS on
the
DEC PDP-11.
Many languages with syntax
derived from C
differentiate between:
- & for bitwise AND, which also (somewhat dangerously) functions as the non-short-circuit logical AND since C represents false/true as zero/nonzero integers, but (4 & 2) is zero (false), whereas (4 && 2) is one (true)
- && for short-circuit logical AND
In C
and C++,
"&" is also used as a unary prefix operator, denoting the
address in
memory of the argument, e.g. &x, &func, &a[3].
(This is called "referencing".)
In C++, unary
prefix & in a
formal parameter of a function
denotes pass-by-reference.
Ampersand is the string
concatenation
operator in Ada,
AppleScript,
and many BASIC
dialects. In Ada, it applies to all one-dimensional arrays, not
just strings.
In some BASIC
dialects, unary suffix & denotes a variable is of type
long, or 32 bits in length.
In BBC
BASIC, unary prefix ampersand marks an integer literal written
in hexadecimal; it
served a similar function in the Monitor
built into ROM on the Commodore
128, but indicated octal instead, a convention that
spread throughout the Commodore community and is now used in the
VICE
emulator.
In MySQL the '&' has
dual roles. As a logical AND in addition it serves a bitwise
operator of an intersection between elements.
When found at the end of a
Unix
shell command,
the ampersand indicates that the indicated command is to be
processed in the background. Two ampersands means that the next
command should only be evaluated if the current one exits with a
zero status.
In SGML, XML, and HTML, the ampersand is
used to introduce an SGML entity.
The HTML and XML encoding for the ampersand character is the entity
'&'. This creates what is known as the ampersand
problem. For instance, when putting URLs or other material
containing ampersands into XML format files such as RSS
files the amp; has to be added to the & or they are considered
not well formed and computers will be unable to read the files
correctly. When working with large quantities of text this can be
very problematic.
In Microsoft
Windows menus, labels and other captions, the ampersand is used
to denote the keyboard shortcut for that option (Alt + that
letter, which appears underlined).
The ampersand is occasionally
used as a prefix to denote a hexadecimal (base 16) number, such as
&FF for decimal 255.
Ampersand usage in Perl
- In Perl 4 and earlier, it was effectively required to call user-defined subroutines
- In Perl 5, it can still be used to modify the way user-defined subroutines are called
- In Perl 6, the ampersand sigil is only used when referring to a subroutine as an object, never when calling it
Much like C, Perl also uses a
single ampersand to do a bitwise
AND operation on integers and strings, and a double ampersand
as a short-circuit logical
AND operation.
Representation
The ampersand is represented
by Unicode
code
point and ASCII character
38, or hexadecimal
0x0026.
In keyboard
layouts, it is often shift-6,
shift-7
or shift-8.
Web standards
The generic URL
(Uniform Resource Locator) syntax allows for a query string
to be appended to a file name in a web address so that additional
information can be passed to a script; the question
mark, or query mark, ?, is used to indicate the start of a
query string. A query string is usually made up of a number of
different name/value pairs, each separated by the ampersand symbol,
&. For example,
www.example.com/login.php?username=test&password=blank. But see
also
"Ampersands in URI attribute values".
See also
References
External links
ampersand in Czech:
Ampersand
ampersand in Danish:
Og-tegn
ampersand in German:
Et-Zeichen
ampersand in Spanish:
&
ampersand in Esperanto:
Kaj-signo
ampersand in Basque:
Ampersand
ampersand in French:
Esperluette
ampersand in Indonesian:
Ampersand
ampersand in Italian:
Ampersand
ampersand in Hebrew:
אמפרסנד
ampersand in Latin:
&
ampersand in Hungarian: És
jel
ampersand in Dutch:
Ampersand
ampersand in Japanese:
アンパサンド
ampersand in Norwegian:
&
ampersand in Polish:
Et
ampersand in Portuguese:
&
ampersand in Russian:
Амперсанд
ampersand in Finnish:
&
ampersand in Swedish:
Et-tecken
ampersand in Thai:
แอมเพอร์แซนด์
ampersand in Turkish: Ve
imi