What is the name of the symbol '&' commonly called?

The symbol “&” is commonly called an ampersand. It represents the word “and” and is also known as the and sign.

The character began as a ligature—the combination of two letters—of the Latin word et, meaning “and.” Roman handwriting used joined forms of E and T as early as the 1st century CE. Over centuries, repeated handwriting and printing styles transformed the letters into the modern symbol.

The English name came from the phrase “and per se and,” traditionally spoken when reciting letters that could also stand alone as words. The phrase was gradually slurred into “ampersand,” a term recorded in common English by 1837. Despite a popular misconception, the name is not connected to the physicist André-Marie Ampère.

An ampersand is common in company names, titles, typography, and informal writing. It should not be confused with the at sign (@), percent sign (%), or asterisk (*). In Unicode, it is encoded as U+0026.