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The Tironian et (⁊) is found in Old Irish language script, a Latin-based script generally only used for decorative purposes today, where it signifies agus ("and") in Irish. However, while the ampersand was in origin a common ligature in everyday script, the Tironian et was part of a highly specialised stenographic shorthand. Both symbols have their roots in the classical antiquity, and both signs were used throughout the Middle Ages as a representation for the Latin word et ("and"). The ampersand should not be confused with the Tironian "et" ⁊, which has the same meaning, but which in appearance resembles the numeral 7. In her 1859 novel Adam Bede, George Eliot refers to this when she makes Jacob Storey say: "He thought it had only been put to finish off th' alphabet like though ampusand would ha' done as well, for what he could see." The popular nursery rhyme Apple Pie ABC finishes with the lines "X, Y, Z, and ampersand, All wished for a piece in hand". Moore's 1863 book The Dixie Primer, for the Little Folks. Similarly, & was regarded as the 27th letter of the English alphabet, as taught to children in the US and elsewhere. The ampersand often appeared as a character at the end of the Latin alphabet, as for example in Byrhtferð's list of letters from 1011. Since the ampersand's roots go back to Roman times, many languages that use a variation of the Latin alphabet make use of it. After the advent of printing in Europe in 1455, printers made extensive use of both the italic and Roman ampersands. The modern italic type ampersand is a kind of " et" ligature that goes back to the cursive scripts developed during the Renaissance. The et-ligature, however, continued to be used and gradually became more stylized and less revealing of its origin (figures 4–6). During the later development of the Latin script leading up to Carolingian minuscule (9th century) the use of ligatures in general diminished. In the later and more flowing New Roman Cursive, ligatures of all kinds were extremely common figures 2 and 3 from the middle of 4th century are examples of how the et-ligature could look in this script.

and the Old Roman cursive, in which the letters E and T occasionally were written together to form a ligature (Evolution of the ampersand – figure 1). The ampersand can be traced back to the 1st century A.D. Example of ampersand based on a crossed epsilon, as might be handwritten