The Symbol That Used to Be the Alphabet's 27th Letter

In 1863, The Dixie Primer, for the Little Folks listed twenty-seven characters in the English alphabet. The last one, after Z, was &.

Schoolchildren reciting the alphabet had a problem with letters that doubled as words. "A" and "I" were letters, but they were also full English words, so teachers added a Latin clarifier — per se, "by itself" — to mark the difference: "A per se, A." The ampersand, sitting at the end of the alphabet and standing for the word and, got the same treatment. Children chanted "X, Y, Z, and per se and."

Said quickly enough, "and per se and" collapses into ampersand. The slurred classroom phrase had hardened into a noun by 1837, and the Notes and Queries journal was already cataloguing "amperzand" as a folk spelling by 1871.

The character itself is older than the word for it by about eighteen centuries. It started as a Roman scribal shortcut: a ligature of e and t, Latin for and, written in a single quick pen-stroke. Some of the earliest surviving examples are scratched into walls in Pompeii, sealed in by the Vesuvius eruption in 79 CE.

Sometime in the late nineteenth century, the ampersand quietly dropped off the end of the alphabet, and nobody seems to have written down why. The word stayed. The symbol stayed. The reason it has the name it does — a child's mumble, frozen — is what got lost.