Common Symbols THE HISTORY AND USAGE OF

01 The ampersand symbol is a logogram; in

written language, a logogram is a character

that denotes a particular word or phrase.

The & symbol represents the conjunction

and, which is used to grammatically connect

words or phrases.

The Ampersand &&

The ampersand symbol actually comes from the Latin word et, which means and. Linking the letters e and t created the ampersand symbol. Today, the ampersand symbol still signifies the word and.

The word ampersand, however, is actually a lot newer than the symbol itself—more than 1,500 years newer. When the ampersand symbol was added to the English alphabet in the early 1800s, reciting the alphabet became tricky, as ending it with and was awkward. So schoolchildren would say, "X, Y, Z, and per se and," since per se means by itself. Of course, merging these words creates theword ampersand.

W H E R E D O E S T H E A M P E R S A N D C O M E

F R O M ?  

&

So HowDo YouUse It?

You shouldn't use the ampersand in formal

situations, although academic usage depends

on the preferred or requested style guide.

Ampersands are most commonly seen in

business names; in the academic world, you

might use an ampersand to join author

names in an in-text citation or list of

references, such as in APA style. You might

also use an ampersand to address a letter or

in a screenplay. However, the word and is

most commonly preferred.

02The @ sign, read aloud as at, was

originally most often used in

accounting to mean "at the rate

of." Today, the at sign is most

commonly used in electronic

communication.

The At Sign @@

The at sign is known to have been used by monks and was possibly even invented by them to speed up the transcription process (which was, of course, done by hand). Using the at sign helped them to decrease the number of pen strokes necessary to communicate the same information. It's also likely that the at sign originated from à, which means at in Italian.

The at sign was also once used as an abbreviation for amphora. The amphora was a unit of measurement for large terra cotta jars of the same name that were used to ship wine, spices, and grain. The unit later took on a role in commerce to mean "at the rate of," where it is still used today.

W H E R E D O E S T H E A T S I G N C O M E F R O M ?

@

So HowDo YouUse It?

The at sign is used today in commerce

and in electronic communication. It is

logically used in email addresses and

across social media. It's also used in

informal speech to signify the word at,

but this should definitely be avoided

in formal writing.

03The pound sign, the number sign, or, more

recently, the hashtag are all the same symbol (#).

It comes from the Latin abbreviation for weight,

lb, standing for libra pondo, which means "pound

by weight." Calling it "the number sign" originated

in Britain, as the name pound was confused with

the British currency (i.e., pounds). Today, it is

often referred to as the hashtag, and it also has

different meanings for musicians, proofreaders,

and computer coders.

The Pound Sign ##

The official name of the pound sign is the octothorpe, a word invented in factories that manufactured telephones. In the 1960s, the telephone keypad was modified to include the poundsign, and octo was used to refer to the eight ends around the edge of the symbol.

The use of thorpe is a little less clear; it could be named after famed American athlete Jim Thorpe, it could be a nonsense word, or it could refer to the Old Norse word "thorpe," which means farm or field.

The word hash is actually older than octothorpe. But only recently have hashtags been popularized across social media, especially Twitter, to tag topics of interest on networks to more easily track and find posts on certain topics. According to Benjamin Zimmer, an American linguist and lexicographer, Stowe Boyd was the first to coin the term hashtag in a blog post in which he referred to the use of the hash symbol to tag topics on Twitter.

W H E R E D I D T H E P O U N D S I G N C O M E F R O M ?  

#

So HowDo YouUse It?

The pound sign is more commonly used in

informal contexts. As mentioned above,

musicians may use the sign in reading music

(as it indicates a sharp), proofreaders might

use it to designate the insertion of a space, and

computer coders can use it to mark comments

or commands in programming language.

Clearly, the usage of the pound sign varies; it

is still seen on telephone keypads, but you can

also use it to mark hashtags on Twitter. 

You can't use the symbols &, @, or # in most formal contexts,

but the ampersand symbol, at sign, and pound sign are all still in use today, and only time will

tell how these symbols and meanings might morph in the

future.

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