What do you think of this fact?
Sing the alphabet in your head. A, B, C, all the way down to Z, done. Two hundred years ago, English-speaking kids weren’t done yet. After Z came one more character: &. According to Dictionary.com, that little squiggle was once the 27th member of the alphabet.
And by itself is and
The problem: how do you recite a symbol? In the late Middle Ages, Merriam-Webster explains, single letters that were also words got a little phrase when spelled out. For “I” it was “I per se, I”, Latin for “I by itself (is the word) I”. Etymonline says “a” and “o” were sometimes treated the same way back in the 15th and 16th centuries.
The & got the same deal. In early alphabet lists it came right after Z and was rendered ”& per se, and”, meaning ”& by itself (is the word) and”. Dictionary.com says that in the early 1800s, school kids reciting their ABCs ended with “X, Y, Z, and per se and”. Etymonline calls it a hybrid phrase, partly Latin, partly English.
How a chant became a word
Say “and per se and” fast enough, often enough, and you get the word we use today: ampersand. Merriam-Webster puts its first known use at 1795, Etymonline dates it to 1797 and even lists an earlier colloquial form, “ampassy”, from 1706. Merriam-Webster is very clear about one thing: the name owes nothing to “amp” or “sand”.
The symbol itself is far older than its name. Britannica traces it to a ligature of the Latin word “et”, meaning “and”. Dictionary.com says Roman scribes in the first century wrote in cursive and linked the E and the T. Etymonline points to shorthand signs found in graffiti from Pompeii. That’s also why “&c” was once a common way of writing “etc.”, which starts with “et” too.
Because old schoolbooks printed the ampersand at the very end of the alphabet, by the 1880s “ampersand” had picked up a slang meaning, according to Etymonline: your rear end.
So every & in a company name or a logo is a retired letter that still shows up for work.