Most people learn the alphabet as a tidy string of twenty-six letters, ending confidently with Z. But for generations of English-speaking schoolchildren, the familiar sequence did not quite stop there. After Z came &, the character we know as the ampersand. It was treated enough like a letter that students reciting the alphabet would finish with “and per se and,” meaning “and, by itself, and.”

That phrase is the key to the symbol’s unusual name. In older classroom language, “per se” was used when a character could also be a word by itself. A child might say “I per se I” or “A per se A” to distinguish the letter from the word. When the final character was reached, “and per se and” was spoken quickly, again and again, until it blurred into “ampersand.”

The symbol itself has even deeper roots. It began as a stylized combination of the letters E and T, spelling et, the Latin word for “and.” Medieval scribes loved abbreviations, and over time their flowing handwritten et evolved into the looping mark used in printing, branding, and design today.

Calling the ampersand the 27th letter can be slightly misleading, because it was never a standard letter in the same way as A or B. Still, its place in alphabet recitations was real enough to leave a linguistic fossil behind: the name “ampersand” preserves the way children once learned it.

Today, the ampersand is more symbol than letter, appearing in company names, creative titles, and shorthand notes. Yet its old classroom role gives it a charm few punctuation marks can match. It reminds us that the alphabet was not always as fixed as it feels, and that even a tiny curl of ink can carry centuries of history. That is a lot for one small sign, indeed.