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How to use an ampersand

An ampersand is used in the following circumstances:

• Where it is part of a business name. A classic example is Marks & Spencer,

who always write their name with an ampersand. Except for their website,

because you can’t use the symbol in a URL.

• In a tweet, where space is short. I abbreviate ‘and’ to ‘&’ only when I’m

cutting the length of a tweet to fit the 140 character limit.

• In academic references, such as ‘Allcot & West, 2010’. This is where I’m

quoting a source document written by two or more authors.

• In abbreviations where it looks right, such as ‘R&D’ (research and

development).

The Writers Guild of America imbues the ampersand with a very precise

meaning when it appears in credits, say for a film. Where two writers’ names are

separated by ‘and’ it means they wrote separately, with perhaps one amending

the work of the other.

The use of ‘&’ implies that the writers adopted a morecollaborative approach, working together on the script. The origins of the ampersand

This section is for those, like me, who are curious as to the roots of this odd

character. Apparently it was once regarded as the 27th letter in the alphabet.

The symbol was called ‘and’ but when the alphabet was recited aloud, children

would end it with ‘X, Y, Z and per se and.’ The ‘per se’ indicated that ‘and’ was

by itself, a separate letter. Over time this became corrupted to ‘ampersand’, the

word evolving during the early 1800s.

The shape of the ampersand dates back to Roman times and is a combination

of the letters ‘e’ and ‘t’, which formed the Latin word for ‘and’.