The Symbol That Used To Come After ‘Z’ in the Alphabet

For a surprisingly long period of history, reciting the alphabet didn’t end where you’d expect it to. Children reading from schoolroom primers didn’t stop at “z.” Instead, they habitually tacked on one more symbol: a curvy character that wasn’t a letter at all, but a shorthand squiggle for the word “and.” That symbol eventually earned its own peculiar name — the ampersand — with an equally peculiar etymology. Here’s why the ampersand once had a place as the alphabet’s unofficial 27th member.

From Roman Shorthand to Schoolroom Standard

The story of the ampersand begins around 2,000 years ago, when it was not a distinct symbol but a ligature — a scribe’s shortcut created by joining the letters “e” and “t” from the Latin word et, meaning “and.” Roman scribes writing in cursive began fusing the two letters together into a single, quick stroke to save time and space. Over centuries of handwriting, the fused et gradually smoothed into the rounded, looping shape recognizable today as the “&” symbol. 

By the time English-language schoolbooks and hornbooks — primers used to teach children their letters — became common in the 18th and 19th centuries, the “&” symbol had become a familiar, everyday piece of written English meaning “and.” It was so common, in fact, that it earned a spot directly after “Z” in many schoolroom recitations of the alphabet, in effect becoming the 27th letter (or quasi-letter, as Merriam-Webster calls it) of the alphabet. 

Rather than finishing an alphabetic recitation by saying “X, Y, Z, and” — which would have been confusing and somewhat abrupt — students were taught to finish the alphabet by saying “X, Y, Z, and per se ‘and.’” Here, “per se” comes from the Latin term meaning “by itself,” so the students were essentially saying, “X, Y, Z, and by itself ‘and.’” 

Why It’s Called “Ampersand”

“Ampersand” is a peculiar-sounding word — a word one might imagine comes from Latin or Greek. But its etymological origins actually lie directly in the alphabetic recitations described above. Recited quickly and repeatedly by generations of schoolchildren, that mouthful of “and per se ‘and’” gradually slurred together into a single word: “And per se ‘and’” became “ampersand.”

The word “ampersand” first appears in written form in the late 18th century. One of the earliest examples comes from Samuel Jackson Pratt’s 1795 travelogue, Gleanings through Wales, Holland, and Westphalia. This example is particularly notable because rather than using the now-common expression “from A to Z,” Pratt wrote, “Having tried all the historians from great A, to ampersand.” 

Falling Out of the Alphabet

Despite its long run as an honorary 27th letter, the ampersand was never actually a true letter of the alphabet. It always represented a whole word rather than a single sound, which set it apart from the rest of the alphabet in a fundamental way. 

Eventually, as formal alphabet instruction evolved and became more standardized, educators dropped the symbol from classroom recitation, treating it instead as a separate punctuation mark and typographical symbol rather than a letter in its own right. By the late 19th century, “&” was no longer part of the English alphabet. 

The ampersand itself, of course, never disappeared. It remains a fixture of logos, legal documents, and company names, and while it lost its place in the alphabet, it’s still doing the same basic job: standing in for the word “and.”