The earliest history of the character & can be traced back to the 1st century AD. It was originally a ligature of the Latin et (meaning and). The earliest & resembled the combination of E and T, and as printing technology developed, the symbol came into its own and grew out of its original shadow. In this character, the shadow of E can still be seen, but the T has disappeared. Pictured is the evolution of the & character, with 1 more like its original ligature representation, 2 and 3 developed in the 4th century, and 4 to 6 in the 9th century. By the 18th century, & had evolved into a highly decorative calligraphy character. The modern & basically retains the appearance of & in the 9th century.
Italic & is a later connected form of E and T, also found in modern fonts. They are a product of the curved fonts of the Renaissance and look more graceful. In the round writing method of "multiple &", all "&" are written with two strokes: starting from the top, going down counterclockwise, turning a large arc, moving upward and closing the pen into a clockwise arc: from the same Start writing in the right position, write the next stroke directly, and then add a decorative ending (as shown in the picture). In addition, in the 18th century, people often followed & with a lowercase c, indicating etc (et cetera, also Latin, indicating etc., others. Widely used in European languages). The word "ampersand" was first added to the dictionary in 1837. It is a connected pronunciation of "and, per se and". & is included in any Roman font and is used frequently in modern languages. In modern times, it is more widely used. In text messages and Twitter text, & is used to replace the word "And". In programming languages ????(such as MySQL, C and C++, XML, SGML, and BASIC), it means "and". For example: In the song, Zhang San & Li Si, it means that this song is sung by Zhang San and Li Si*** together. This symbol is also fully used in mathematical logic.