The ampersand (&) originated with Roman scribes around the 1st century AD who sought to write more efficiently. They created a ligature by combining the letters "e" and "t" from the Latin word "et," which means "and." This practice was a feature of evolving Roman cursive scripts. The symbol became particularly common in medieval monastic scriptoria, where monks copying manuscripts used it to streamline their laborious work on expensive parchment. The name itself is a more recent invention. In 19