Ligatures are two or more characters that are joined to form a single character. They are meant to replace certain letter pair combinations that space poorly when typeset next to each other, such as fi and fl.
A ligature that has evolved into a glyph itself is the ampersand (&), which is the abbreviation of et, the Latin word for “and.” It is the corruption of the phrase “and per se & (and)” meaning “and intrinsically the word and represented by the symbol &” The writing of it can be traced back to the 1st century A.D. in Roman cursive where the letters e and t were written together to create a ligature. It evolved over the next centuries to what it is today. The illustration below shows this evolution. ...
Get The Art of Type and Typography now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
