The English alphabet once had a 27th letter — and you probably use it without even realizing

It’s common knowledge that the English alphabet contains 26 letters. However few people know that when the printing press came into existence in the fifteenth century, the alphabet used to contain one more letter that came after Z. It’s considered to be a symbol more than a letter these days but everyone who knows the English language recognizes it as ‘&’.

The ‘&’ symbol is called ampersand and it has an interesting history. The origin of the symbol can be dated back to ancient Rome, one of the earliest civilizations in which writing was used extensively. The Latin word for ‘and’ was ‘et’ and the two letters were combined into one. This is also known as a ligature. Instances of ligatures are widespread among various cultures. Perhaps the most popular one is the combination of ‘a’ and ‘e’ to make ae as a single letter with a unique phoneme.

So ‘et’ together in Latin meant ‘and’ and over the years, the way these two words were written changed. Cursive writing played an important role in making these two letters look like the ampersand. Till the time the printing press was invented, ‘&’ was considered an independent letter. Students studying the alphabet at the time would say, "Q R S T U V W X Y Z and per se &" according to a report in Good.

Per se is also a Latin term that means by itself. This was used so that students understood that the word ‘and’ and the ampersand symbol stands for the same thing. “And per se and,” when said quickly sounded like ampersand, which is what we know the symbol ‘&’ to mean today. A Reddit user shared this information on the platform stating that the ampersand was seen as a part of the alphabet even during the early to mid 1800s.

The comments section proved that this was not a fact that a lot of people were aware of but they were intrigued upon knowing the reality. What’s even more interesting is the historical evidence available that shows how people in ancient times used the ampersand. According to an article in Moshik Nadav Typography, the symbol can be traced back to the very first recorded year in human history.

The earliest recorded evidence of the ampersand’s existence was found as wall graffiti in the first century AD on a wall in Pompeii. It was also around this time that Tiro, a personal servant to the Roman emperor Cicero was developing a system to take down notes quickly.

He used the symbol derived from the Latin ‘et’ and by the 8th century, his symbol had developed into something very similar to ‘&’.