Historically, & was regarded as the 27th letter of the Latin alphabet. The name derives from and per se and.
It is generally used interchangeably with and. However, in film credits for story, screenplay, etc., & indicates a closer collaboration than and.
The ampersand represents a vowel in the orthography for the Marshallese language[?].
In some computer programming languages, the & sign is used to indicate logical and.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump