The sign & (standing for and, as in Smith & Co., or the Latin et, as in &c.).
‘This includes quotes, apostrophes, ellipses, em and en dashes, multiplication symbols, and ampersands.’
‘But what is so special about the ampersand, specifically, in regard to this?’
‘To keep your URL as simple as possible, try to exclude characters such as question marks and ampersands.’
‘These are little labels enclosed between an ampersand and a semi-colon.’
‘Since my blogger app simply turns the posting's first paragraph into its item description, an ampersand in graph one brought the feed to its knees.’
‘I enjoy this because, as any cursory glance through my journals will attest, I use squashy, amorphous ampersands with abandon when I'm writing for no one but myself.’
‘You no longer even need to know that secret web language of strange acronyms and miscellaneous ampersands that kept it all much more exclusive in the Good Old Days.’
‘But Gilbert & George (the ampersand is vital) never grew up.’
‘There's a red ampersand imposed over their chests.’
‘On the homepage, doing a quick validation, there's only one error that doesn't come from that code, and that's because I put an ampersand on the page without properly encoding it.’
‘Most of my coding validates, but when it doesn't it's usually due to the fact that there's an ampersand or something like that in a link and it doesn't like it.’
‘Still its nice to see clearly, I'd forgotten that an ampersand was not in fact solid blobs of black with a tail but had spaces in between.’
‘The ampersand is an ancient Roman symbol derived from the ligature or combination into one character of the e and t in the Latin et, meaning and.’
‘The prime was followed by a mask comprising a series of 15 ampersands that remained on screen for 500 ms, followed by a 300-ms blank screen.’
‘So, I wrote my own little code snippet that grabbed the URL, split on the question mark and then split the second element of that array on ampersands.’
‘We catch things like unencoded ampersands and can correct some other common XHTML mistakes.’
‘He utilizes the ampersand as a ‘measured pause’ which allows the reader, like the musician, to breathe while playing/singing.’
‘An accelerator key (marked with an underline beneath the letter that you would use on the label of a button) can be set with an ampersand placed in front of the letter you are using.’
‘Each line is a command to run, and, with the exception of the window manager line, each command must be placed in the background using the ampersand.’
‘To avoid any further confusion, though, Ryan took the ampersand out of the show's title and replaced it with a slash.’
Origin
Late 18th century alteration of and per se and ‘& by itself is and’, formerly chanted as an aid to learning the sign.
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