The Front

For people that like typography:

The ampersandampersand blog at tumblr works like a page-a-day calender, displaying a new ampersand in a different font each day. Set it as the home page for your browser & begin each day with a fresh look at everyone’s favorite conjunctive abbreviation. Clicking on an ‘&’ will link you to the font it uses.

Word detective describes the history of this symbol thusly:

The name “ampersand” certainly sounds as if it should mean something terribly exotic, coined in the misty yesteryear of typography, but its roots are actually quite humble, and we have the long-suffering schoolchild to thank for the word. It comes from the practice once common in schools of reciting all 26 letters of the alphabet plus the “&” sign, pronounced “and,” which was considered part of the alphabet, at least for learning purposes.

Any letter that could also be used as a word in itself (“A,” “I,” “&” and, at one point, “O”) was preceded in the recitation by the Latin phrase “per se” (“by itself”) to draw the students’ attention to that fact. Thus the end of this daily ritual would go: “X, Y, Z and per se and.” This last phrase was routinely slurred to “ampersand” by children rightly bored to tears, and the term crept into common English usage by around 1837.

The ampersand symbol itself, the “&,” while devilishly hard to draw by hand, becomes much less mysterious when revealed as a stylized rendi�tion of the Latin word “et,” meaning, of course, “and.” Finally, it’s interest�ing to note that proofreaders reading copy aloud to one another (as I can attest based on a spell spent as a proofreader) pronounce the ampersand symbol “et” to distinguish it from the actual word “and.”

That’s, uh… fascinating.