The ampersand is the Latin word et, "and", written so quickly that its two letters fused. The earliest known example is a scrawl on a wall in Pompeii; the name came some seventeen centuries later, from a schoolroom chant, "and per se and", that the Oxford English Dictionary first finds in 1777.
EdCitation publishes this guide. Every date and quotation in it was read at its source on 2 October 2026, and where we could read a claim only second-hand, we say so.
The sign still matters to anyone with a reference list, because APA, Harvard and MLA disagree about it. EdCitation's free Cite a source builds each reference from the publisher's record in six styles, ampersand or "and" included. It never writes a word of your paper: the sentences, and the narrative citations in them, stay yours.
Where does the ampersand come from?
The ampersand comes from a ligature, two letters joined into one sign, of the Latin et. Its earliest known appearance is a graffito from Pompeii; no one knows when it was written, but the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 sets the latest possible date (Houston, 2011a).
The joined e and t in Roman and later hands
Houston (2011a) reproduces the Pompeii example from the English edition of Jan Tschichold's study, and notes that it barely qualifies as a ligature: the middle arm of the E just touches the t. Scribes fused the pair more tightly, and in Tschichold's sequence an eighth-century Merovingian example already looks like the modern shape (Houston, 2011b). We could not read Tschichold's booklet itself, so these forms reach us through Houston.
Frederic Goudy's 1936 study drew 30 of its 68 ampersands from manuscripts, and judged one from a 1283 manuscript of Petrus Comestor "might almost pass for the & of a gothic type" (Czapkowski, 2019). Blake (2021), a senior cataloguer at the Folger Shakespeare Library, calls & the best-known brevigraph, a handwriting shortcut early printers carried on, as in "&c." for et cetera.
The rival: the Tironian et
Tradition credits Cicero's secretary Tiro with a Latin shorthand, and one of its signs, shaped like a 7, stood for et. Wright (2015), writing for Notre Dame's Medieval Institute, explains that the shorthand flourished at Carolingian courts from roughly 750 to 900, and that English scribes used the 7 for their own "and". The Online Etymology Dictionary is firm that & does not descend from it (Harper, n.d.).
Houston (2011b) counts 48 Tironian ets in Tschichold's survey against more than 200 ampersands, and finds the 7 surviving mainly in Irish Gaelic. Rare-book cataloguers transcribe it silently as & (Blake, 2021).
Why is it called an ampersand?
It is called an ampersand because the alphabet chant ended "and per se and": the sign & "by itself" is the word and. A letter that was also a word, such as I, was named with the Latin per se, "by itself", so the letter was not taken for the word (Merriam-Webster, n.d.-b); Etymonline dates the habit to the 15th and 16th centuries (Harper, n.d.). Said quickly, the end of the chant ran into one word. Goudy, in 1936, called the name "a corruption of the mixed English and Latin phrase" (Czapkowski, 2019).
When was the word first recorded?
The dictionaries agree on the origin and differ on the date. The OED's free summary, from an entry revised in 2019, gives the earliest evidence, a 1777 diary entry by the writer Hester Lynch Thrale; the quotation itself is behind the subscription, so we have not read it (Oxford University Press, n.d.). Merriam-Webster (n.d.-a) gives 1795.
| Dictionary | Earliest date it gives | What it says about the name |
|---|---|---|
| Oxford English Dictionary | 1777, Hester Lynch Thrale's diary | Alteration of "and per se and" |
| Merriam-Webster | 1795 | Alteration of "and (&) per se and" |
| Online Etymology Dictionary | 1797; the colloquial ampassy from 1706 | A contraction of "and per se and", partly Latin, partly English |
The Amper's-and story is not true
A popular story derives the name from "Amper's and", after an inventor. Houston (2011c) finds it in an 1883 book on names and in Urban Dictionary, which names a 17th-century typesetter, Manfred Johann Amper, who appears never to have existed. What is documented is how children mangled the chant: Houston quotes Farmer and Henley's 1905 slang dictionary, with variants from and-pussy-and to zumzy-zan. Because the sign ended the alphabet, the word had gained a slang sense, the backside, by the 1880s (Harper, n.d.).
Was the ampersand the 27th letter of the alphabet?
Only in the schoolroom: some 19th-century primers printed & after Z, and children recited it with the letters. Merriam-Webster (n.d.-b) says a 19th-century alphabet would "very likely" have ended with &, and calls it a "27th quasi-letter".
We read one such primer. John P. Carter's My Own Primer, transcribed by Michigan State University Libraries, sets the alphabet on page 5 in five rows ending "Z &" (Carter, 1857). The practice alphabets on pages 7 to 10 stop at Z, and their exercise asks the child to show "a, b, c, &c.". Houston (2011c) found the same page and says the sign was routinely taught this way, citing an 1893 study we have not read. We found no count of how many primers did it, so the 27th letter was a teaching habit, never a rule of English.
Which type designers drew famous ampersands?
Two designers made the ampersand a subject of study: Frederic W. Goudy in 1936 and Jan Tschichold in 1953.
Frederic Goudy: Ands & Ampersands (1936)
Goudy, the American type designer, wrote "Ands & Ampersands" for the Typophiles' 1936 Christmas keepsake, Diggings from Many Ampersandhogs, issued in 125 copies (Czapkowski, 2019). His 64 pages ask "What in Sam Hill is an Ampersand?" and show 68 ampersands, 38 of them from metal type. The text was set in Deepdene, his own design, and his son, Fred T. Goudy, cut and cast the ampersands from his drawings.
Jan Tschichold and the italic ampersand
Tschichold published Formenwandlungen der &-Zeichen in 1953, in English in 1957 as The Ampersand: Its Origin and Development, building on Goudy and Paul Standard to set out hundreds of examples (Houston, 2011b). Houston shows roman and italic ampersands in Hoefler Text, Palatino, Goudy Old Style and Garamond, and calls the italic one "something of a playground for typographers", often still showing its e and t. Letter design remains research: Bernard et al. (2016) built a font, Eido, for peripheral vision and found fewer recognition errors but no faster reading.
When do you use & in APA, Harvard and MLA?
Use & in APA 7 only inside brackets and in the reference list, and write "and" in your sentence. MLA 9, Chicago and IEEE use "and", Vancouver neither, and Harvard depends on your university's version. MLA's editors give the general view: ampersands "belong to design typography" and are best kept out of prose (Modern Language Association, 2020a).
| Style | Where & goes between authors | Example | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| APA 7 | Brackets; before the last author in the list (2 to 20 authors) | (Salas & D’Agostino, 2020), but Salas and D’Agostino (2020) | American Psychological Association (2019, 2025) |
| Harvard, Cite Them Right | Nowhere | (Shah and Papadopoulos, 2015) | Open University (n.d.) |
| Hull Harvard | Brackets and the reference list | (Alley & Neeley, 2005); Nunn, C. L. & Altizer, S. M. | University of Hull Library (2026) |
| UOW Harvard | Brackets and the reference list | (Carlin & Ford 2006, p. 79) | University of Wollongong Library (2026) |
| Harvard, Australian Government Style Manual | Nowhere | (Kral and Lomber 2015) | James Cook University Library (2026) |
| MLA 9 | Nowhere; a publisher's & becomes "and" | Dorris, Michael, and Louise Erdrich; Simon and Schuster | Modern Language Association (2019); Wallace (2023) |
| Chicago 18 author-date | Nowhere; a title's own & stays | (Binder and Kidder 2022, 117–18); Privacy & Terms | University of Chicago Press (n.d.) |
| IEEE | Nowhere | B. Klaus and P. Horn | IEEE (2025) |
| Vancouver | Neither & nor "and"; a group author's & stays | Merritt, Hawkins & Associates | National Library of Medicine (2018) |
| Six styles, built for you | Wherever that style puts it | (Clark & Peterson, 2024) in APA | EdCitation's Cite a source, 2 October 2026 |
APA 7: & in brackets, "and" in sentences
APA's page states both halves, and a rare case: & before the last name when every author must be written to avoid an ambiguous et al. (American Psychological Association, 2019). In the list, & precedes the final author for two to 20 authors; from 21, the list gives 19 names, an ellipsis and the last name, with no ampersand (American Psychological Association, 2025), as when to use et al. shows. The other in-text forms are in APA 7 in-text citations.
Harvard, MLA and the ampersand inside a name
Harvard has no single rulebook, as our Harvard referencing guide explains: follow the version your module names. Answering for the 8th edition, MLA's editors turn an & in a title or a publisher's name into "and" (Modern Language Association, 2020b), and in 2023 an MLA editor corrected a generator's "Simon & Schuster" to "Simon and Schuster" for MLA 9 (Wallace, 2023). Chicago's samples keep the & in Google's Privacy & Terms, and Citing Medicine keeps it in a group author. The comma before an ampersand is in the Oxford comma debate.
What does Cite a source give for two and three authors?
It gives each style's own joining word. On 2 October 2026 we gave EdCitation's Cite a source two DOIs and quote what came back, unchanged. Both records came from Crossref, and neither was reported as retracted.
Two authors: Clark and Peterson (2024)
- APA 7: Clark, L. B., & Peterson, M. (2024). Ampersand aesthetics: Spatula&Barcode’s Foodways Philippines. Global Performance Studies, 6(1–2). https://doi.org/10.33303/gpsv6n1-2a132. In the text: (Clark & Peterson, 2024).
- Harvard: Clark, L.B. and Peterson, M. (2024) ‘Ampersand Aesthetics: Spatula&Barcode’s Foodways Philippines’, Global Performance Studies, 6(1–2). Available at: https://doi.org/10.33303/gpsv6n1-2a132. In the text: (Clark and Peterson, 2024).
- MLA 9: Clark, Laurie Beth, and Michael Peterson. “Ampersand Aesthetics: Spatula&Barcode’s Foodways Philippines.” Global Performance Studies, vol. 6, nos. 1–2, June 2024, https://doi.org/10.33303/gpsv6n1-2a132. In the text: (Clark and Peterson).
Spatula&Barcode is the name the two artists work under, and all three styles kept its ampersand. Crossref's record stores it escaped twice, as &; Cite a source printed one clean &. Check one point by hand: MLA's 8th-edition answer would turn a title's & into "and", and its posts do not say whether that reaches a name, so ask your tutor.
Three authors: Bernard et al. (2016)
For 10.1371/journal.pone.0152506, the author lines and in-text citations came back as follows:
| Style | Authors in the reference, as returned | In the text, as returned |
|---|---|---|
| APA 7 | Bernard, J.-B., Aguilar, C., & Castet, E. (2016). | (Bernard et al., 2016) |
| Harvard | Bernard, J.-B., Aguilar, C. and Castet, E. (2016) | (Bernard, Aguilar and Castet, 2016) |
| MLA 9 | Bernard, Jean-Baptiste, et al. | (Bernard et al.) |
With three authors APA's & survives only in the list, because the citation shortens to et al.; Harvard names all three with "and" and no comma before it. The narrative forms are yours to write: Bernard et al. (2016) in APA, Bernard, Aguilar and Castet (2016) in Cite Them Right Harvard.
How do you get the ampersand right in your paper?
Build references from their records, write the narrative citations yourself, then check.
- Find the style and version. Check your paper, free, reads your brief into a checklist that includes the citation style. If it says Harvard, find out which.
- Build each reference. Give Cite a source a DOI, title, PubMed ID, ISBN or web address, and copy the reference and its bracketed citation.
- Write narrative citations yourself, then search for "&". In APA, any & outside brackets and the list is a slip; in MLA, Cite Them Right Harvard, Chicago, IEEE and Vancouver, any & between authors is.
- Match citations to the list. Upload the whole paper to Verify references, free: every reference is checked against the publishers' records, and every in-text citation is matched to the list and back.
Why use EdCitation for the ampersand and the rest of the reference?
EdCitation is, in our view, the best tool for this job, because it looks every reference up in the publisher's record and never writes one, so the joining word follows the style's pattern, not a guess. The runs show it: one DOI, three styles, three author lines, each matching its style's own guide, and a twice-escaped ampersand printed as one.
Cite a source is free with no account, builds APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 18 author-date, Harvard (Cite Them Right), IEEE and Vancouver, and screens each source for retraction. Verify references is free too, and never shows "could not check" as "not found". Pro, $8 a month, adds Mechanics QA, which checks a paper's formatting against the style and matches its citations to the list; Max, $24 a month, adds the Library. See pricing.
EdCitation never writes any part of anyone's work, and we are proud of that: every sentence you hand in, each narrative "and" included, is yours.
Quick questions
Why is it called an ampersand?
The alphabet chant ended "and per se and", meaning the sign & by itself is the word and; said quickly, it became one word. The OED's earliest evidence is from 1777.
When do I use & in APA?
Inside parentheses between authors, as in (Salas & D’Agostino, 2020), and before the last author in the reference list. In your sentence, write "and": Salas and D’Agostino (2020).
Does Harvard use & or and?
It depends on the version. Cite Them Right Harvard uses "and" everywhere; Hull Harvard and UOW Harvard put & inside brackets.
Was & the 27th letter of the alphabet?
Not officially. Some 19th-century primers printed it after Z, as John P. Carter's 1857 My Own Primer does, and children recited it with the letters.
Does EdCitation choose & or and for me?
Yes, in the reference and the bracketed citation: EdCitation's Cite a source builds both from the publisher's record in the style you pick. Narrative citations are yours to write.
References
- American Psychological Association. (2019). Author–date citation system. APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/basic-principles/author-date
- American Psychological Association. (2025). Elements of reference list entries. APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/elements-list-entry
- Bernard, J.-B., Aguilar, C., & Castet, E. (2016). A new font, specifically designed for peripheral vision, improves peripheral letter and word recognition, but not eye-mediated reading performance. PLOS ONE, 11(4), Article e0152506. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0152506
- Blake, E. (2021, September 14). A briefing on brevigraphs, those strange shapes in early printed texts. The Collation, Folger Shakespeare Library. https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/brevigraphs/
- Carter, J. P. (1857). My own primer, or, First lessons in spelling and reading. Presbyterian Board of Publication. Michigan State University Libraries. https://archive.lib.msu.edu/DMC/ssb/public/all/myownprimer/ownp.html
- Clark, L. B., & Peterson, M. (2024). Ampersand aesthetics: Spatula&Barcode’s Foodways Philippines. Global Performance Studies, 6(1–2). https://doi.org/10.33303/gpsv6n1-2a132
- Czapkowski, R. (2019, November 28). Ands & ampersands. American Printing History Association. https://printinghistory.org/ands-ampersands/
- Harper, D. (n.d.). Ampersand. In Online etymology dictionary. Retrieved October 2, 2026, from https://www.etymonline.com/word/ampersand
- Houston, K. (2011a, June 12). The ampersand, part 1 of 2. Shady Characters. https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-1-of-2/
- Houston, K. (2011b, June 26). The ampersand, part 2 of 2. Shady Characters. https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-2-of-2/
- Houston, K. (2011c, July 3). The ampersand, part 2½ of 2. Shady Characters. https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/07/the-ampersand-part-2-5-of-2/
- IEEE. (2025). IEEE reference style guide for authors (Version 3.28.2025). IEEE Author Center. https://journals.ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/IEEE_Reference_Guide.pdf
- James Cook University Library. (2026). Authors: Numbers, rules and formatting. Harvard referencing (AGSM). https://libguides.jcu.edu.au/HarvardAGSM/authors
- Merriam-Webster. (n.d.-a). Ampersand. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved October 2, 2026, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ampersand
- Merriam-Webster. (n.d.-b). The history of 'ampersand': How the & got its name. https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/the-history-of-ampersand
- Modern Language Association. (2019, May 13). Why are both a comma and and used to separate the names of coauthors in a works-cited-list entry? MLA Style Center. https://style.mla.org/comma-with-and-for-coauthors/
- Modern Language Association. (2020a, May 4). Should the serial comma be used before an ampersand? MLA Style Center. https://style.mla.org/serial-commas-and-ampersands/
- Modern Language Association. (2020b, May 12). In MLA style, should an ampersand in a publisher’s name be changed to and? MLA Style Center. https://style.mla.org/ampersands-names-of-publishers/
- National Library of Medicine. (2018). Journals. In Citing medicine: The NLM style guide for authors, editors, and publishers (2nd ed.). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK7282/
- Open University. (n.d.). Quick guide to Harvard referencing (Cite Them Right). The Open University Library. https://university.open.ac.uk/library/referencing-and-plagiarism/quick-guide-to-harvard-referencing-cite-them-right
- Oxford University Press. (n.d.). Ampersand, n. In Oxford English dictionary. Retrieved October 2, 2026, from https://www.oed.com/dictionary/ampersand_n
- University of Chicago Press. (n.d.). Author-date: Sample citations. The Chicago Manual of Style Online. https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide/citation-guide-2.html
- University of Hull Library. (2026). Hull Harvard. https://libguides.hull.ac.uk/referencing/harvard
- University of Wollongong Library. (2026). Two to three authors. UOW Harvard. https://uow.libguides.com/uow-harvard-guide/journals-two-authors
- Wallace, J. (2023, November 8). Citation generators and MLA style. MLA Style Center. https://style.mla.org/citation-generators-and-mla-style/
- Wright, B. (2015, February 5). Alien manuscript . . . or ancient writing system. Medieval Studies Research Blog, University of Notre Dame. https://sites.nd.edu/manuscript-studies/2015/02/05/alien-manuscript-or-ancient-writing-system/