I do love the ampersand and am amazed to find out that the & is simply a ligature of the letters E and T (et being the latin word for and). Now officially classified as punctuation, it was once the 27th letter in the English alphabet, existing as the graphical representation of the word ‘and’.

This article has a lot of information about the history of the ampersand, why it is called ‘ampersand’ and its usage: https://medium.com/black-lion-banner/the-history-of-the-ampersand-c81839171940