AJ on Instagram: "You’ve used this symbol a thousand times — but it’s actually a word, a letter, and a shortcut all in one. & ✍️🔍 The ampersand isn’t just a squiggle. It’s a ligature — a mashup of two letters: E and T. In Latin, “et” means “and.” Scribes wrote them together so often, they fused into one shape. By the 1800s, “&” was so common it was taught as the 27th letter of the alphabet — right after Z. Kids would recite: “…X, Y, Z, and per se and.” That last part meant “and, by itself, and.