Log in or Sign up
  1. ampersand love

Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. n. The character or sign (&) representing the word and.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. n. A name formerly in use for the character & or & (also called short and), which is formed by combining the letters of the Latin et, and, and which is commonly placed at the end of the alphabet in primers.

Wiktionary

  1. n. The symbol "&".

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. n. A word used to describe the character �, �, or &.

WordNet 3.0

  1. n. a punctuation mark (&) used to represent conjunction (and)

Etymologies

  1. Alteration of and per se and, & (the sign) by itself (means) and. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

Examples

  • “The ampersand is typically used to save time and space.”

    The curious land of the ampersand

  • “I think I called the ampersand “the squiggly and-thing” or something very similar before I discovered its name.”

    The curious land of the ampersand

  • “[Transcriber's Note: The "|" s below are my best rendition in plain ASCII of a Saxon ampersand, which is a long vertical bar with a short horizontal bar at the top, pointing to the left.] + ORM · GAMAL · SVNA · BOHTE · SC [= S] [+ ORM · GAMAL · SUNA · BOHTE · SANCTUS]”

    The Evolution of an English Town

  • “Either way, we think the ampersand is a ligature for”

    SimpleBits

  • “The single text operator (the so-called ampersand) is used in formulas to join together two or more text entries (an operation with the highfalutin 'name concatenation).”

    Recently Uploaded Slideshows

  • “Go to images.google.com and search for "ampersand" for lots of examples of the extreme variation in style of this particular symbol.”

    OR...

  • “I'd always wondered about the source of the word "ampersand", but never got around to looking it up.”

    Punctuation is Awesome

  • “Schwartz & Wade are relatively easy when you consider that one is named Schwartz and one is named Wade though they pulled a third person onto the stage with them this season, so I guess I'll have to refer to that person as "ampersand".”

    Random House Summer 2007 Preview

  • “Its like that conversation that I had with Roger a while back, boys who know what an "ampersand" is - I totally think is hot.”

    moschikat Diary Entry

  • “To add another forum to ignore just use double "ampersand" as shown above.”

    phpBB.com

Show 10 more examples...

Log in or sign up to add your own related words.

hypernyms (2)

Words that are more generic or abstract

  1. punctuation mark
  1. punctuation

same context (2)

Words that are found in similar contexts

  1. naiad
  1. sense-object

reverse dictionary (3)

Words that contain this word in their definition

  1. Se
  1. appersi-and
  1. ampassy

tags (7)

Free-form, user-generated categorization

  1. typography
  1. fun
  1. punctuation
  1. favorite
  1. vccvccvcc
  1. short and
  1. and

Log in or sign up to add your own tag.

tagging (1)

Words tagged ‘ampersand’

  1. &

Wordmap

(beta)

Word visualization

Lists

These user-created lists contain the word ‘ampersand’.

More lists containing ‘ampersand’

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • danama Anparsy (noun) - (1) Boys, in repeating their alphabet, would say ". . . X, Y, Z, anparsy." They did not know what it meant, but pointed in their spelling books to the character &, also termed parsy-and.
    --M.C.F. Morris's Yorkshire Folk-Talk, 1892
    (2) Anpasty, another name for ampersand. It means and past y.
    --Rev. Robert Forby's Vocabulary of East Anglia, 1830

    – from a daily calendar version of “Forgotten English”, Jeffrey Kacirk
    Mar 29, 2013

  • ruzuzu "And per se and." It's the per se that gets me. They are--by their self-described nature--awesome. Sep 4, 2011

  • Dan337 I know what you mean. History, typography and function aside, there’s something about the sound of it. It makes me want to eat scampi sandwiches in a Southampton forest of sandalwood and palissander with a Sandemanian Sandinista campesino sandhiller champertor named Alessandra Amanda Sandusky Sanderson, then amble a sandstone path unhampered by sandburs through a campestral garden of rampe, sandwort, icosandria, sandberry, and pachysandra. When dampness champs our sandals we’ll swim like champion lampreys to a sandaliform sandbar, and damply scamper onto the ample sand. Sanderlings, sandgrouse and sandpipers will abandon as we expand and tamp a sandcastle, amplify examples of sandhi and anacamptic blandiloquence, and watch the amber night turn lampyridine, not to decamp until a pampero sandstorm (or rampant stampeding tamanduas) demand. Sep 3, 2011

  • katvini10002 I really, really, really, really, really love this word.
    Sep 3, 2011

  • ruzuzu Also see I dislike ampersands. Jun 12, 2011

  • ruzuzu "When the ampersand first came to light a century after Cicero had delivered the Catiline Orations, it emphatically did not issue from the grandees of the Roman establishment; instead, it came quite literally straight from the streets. If the Tironian et was Tiro’s brainchild, the ampersand was an orphan: its creator is not known, and the closest it comes to a parent is the anonymous first century graffiti artist who scrawled it hastily across a Pompeiian wall." -- from the Shady Characters blog. Jun 12, 2011

  • Prolagus "A word used to describe the character �, �, or &." Apr 29, 2011

  • pmpope Symbol representing the word "and"; it is often used in company names. Feb 5, 2009

  • vanishedone I just learnt there's an Ampersand weblog. May 16, 2008

  • frindley There is nothing, simply nothing, better than messing about with ampersands. I love this character nearly as much as I love the letter Q. Apr 10, 2008

  • rolig I agree that ampersands are annoying in text, and generally stylebooks say to convert them to "and", but it's easy to see why people like them so much. They're fun! & What a lovely mark – from the Latin "et"! And sometimes so very elegant in certain fonts. In older books you can see &c. for "etc." Dec 2, 2007

  • uselessness Eschew ampersands & abbreviation, etc. Jan 25, 2007

  • nkocharh This word has a splendid derivation. Dec 11, 2006

Tweets

Looking for tweets for ampersand.

‘ampersand’ has been looked up 3455 times, loved by 16 people, added to 99 lists, commented on 13 times, and has a Scrabble score of 14.