Ever wonder why the ampersand (&) looks so
funky? Well I did. One day I wondered if maybe it was a
combination of letters, and I noticed it
kinda looks like a combination of 'e' and 't'. This was
a long time ago. Then one day I saw some
Latin and it had the word
et in it, and I
knew when I read the translation which one meant
and. Of course, I have no
factual basis for this
assertion, but just look at it! Well, it makes sense to me. Anyway, that's my guess as to why it looks like it does. After all, it means the same as
et. And another thing: You ever write those weird ampersands with the 'E' that looks like a backwards 3 with a line drawn through it (or two little
vertical dashes so it looks like the line goes behind it)? I think that's another
clue. It's definitely got to mean
et.
Other info
To write & it in
HTML, it's best to use
&.
It's
ASCII code is 38 (
0x26).
In
C, the
address of a
variable foo can be represented as
&foo.
& is also used in C as a
bitwise AND, and two ampersands
&& represent a logical
AND.
(I bet you were just dying to know that...)