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The ampersand survived the manually-operated printing era for the same logistical reason: more movable characters could be positioned on a single line by replacing “and”, “und” or “et” with “&”. 810 AD Humanist Minuscule, 1453 William Caslon, 1728 (London).Īfter the advent of printing in Europe in 1455, printers also started making use of this symbol, both for Roman type and for cursive. From left to right: Old Roman Cursive, 79 BC New Roman Cursive, 350 AD ninth century Scottish writing Carolingian Minuscule, c.
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Being able to vary the length of words was very useful so every line could be filled with a justified layout (where all the rows of a column of text are aligned vertically at both the left and the right). The aim of this and many other ligatures was to fit as many words as possible onto one line. Although the use of these ligatures reduced significantly during the transition to Carolingian, the & symbol remained, becoming gradually more stylised and so concealing its origin.įrom the second half of the eighth century AD onwards, the ampersand was used widely by scribes. With the development of New Roman Cursive, many ligatures appeared between various letters. In Old Roman Cursive the ampersand was the ligature between the letters “e” and “t” (“et” means “and” in Latin). Even after he was made a freeman, Tiro continued to transcribe Cicero’s texts, and by 63 BC he had developed a system of shorthand to speed up the writing process, known as the Tironian Notes. History and evolution Transcription of various Tironian notesĪlthough it was brought into common use by the British, the ampersand was first created in the first century BC by the Roman slave Marcus Tullius Tiro, who was Cicero’s personal secretary. & was the final letter in the English alphabet until the early twentieth century the alphabet ended “X, Y, Z and per-se and”, and the contraction of and-per-se-and gave rise to its current name. The character has different names in different languages: in Italian it is known as an e commerciale, in French it is an esperluette, in German it is Et-Zeichen, and it entered the English dictionary as ampersand in 1837. This symbol, widely used and appreciated by many type designers for its great creative potential, has ancient origins that few people are aware of.
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Source Wikipedia: Typographic Ligatures and Ampersand.The ampersand (&) is one of the most unique and interesting typographic characters. To finish, a fun fact about ampersand: The word ampersand is a corruption of the phrase “and (&) per se (means) and”. The first lets you type many special characters directly. In TeX/LaTeX, typesetting these historical ligatures involves either the inputenc package or the backslash escape character (i.e. There are many more examples in modern European and other languages, not necessarily originating from Latin or Germanic. cédille, e.g. ç), also called hook or tail, is a subscript z. ô) originates from an s in Latin that became silent. For example, the German Umlauts ä, ö, and ü are ligatures. However, many people are not aware of them. There are a myriad of historical ligatures in modern European languages. Other software, such as Word, introduced them much later. The computer typesetting system TeX supported ligatures since its beginning in the 1980s. Stylistic ligatures occurred more “recently”, with the invention of (analog) printing. Historical ligatures were present since the beginning of scripts, possibly to increase writing speed. There are two classes, historical and stylistic ligatures. Ligatures are a class of glyphs composed of two individual letters. I have been fascinated with typographic ligatures for quite some time.