The ampersand is the logogram &, representing the conjunction and. It can be traced back to the 1st century A.D. and the Old Roman cursive, in which the letters E and T occasionally were written together to form a ligature. In the later and more flowing New Roman Cursive, ligatures of all kinds were extremely common. During later development of Latin script, the use of ligatures diminished. The et-ligature, however, continued to be used and gradually became more stylized and less revealing of its origin. The modern italic type ampersand is an et ligature that goes back to the scripts developed during the Renaissance.
