&
Ampersand
Joins names and pairs where 'and' would be spelled out: Smith & Sons, R&D, rock & roll. In HTML it must always be escaped as an entity, because a bare & starts every other entity. Style guides reserve it for proper names, headlines and tight spaces — in running prose, write 'and'. Italic ampersands in many serif fonts still draw a visible E-t.
Biography
Roman cursiveLiterally the Latin word et — and — fused into one character: a ligature so old it appears in Pompeiian graffiti. The name is a mangled school recitation. Children reciting the alphabet ended it with 'and per se and' — and, by itself, and — and generations of slurring compressed the phrase into 'ampersand'.
Hover the sketch — et fuses into &.also known aset ligature
Copy it anywhere
- Symbol
& - Unicode
U+0026 - HTML entity
& - CSS content
\0026 - JavaScript
\u0026 - URL encoded
%26 - Windows Alt code
Alt+38