deranger , 27 days ago

It’s & - ampersand aka “and per se and”. The article also mentions these:

lost letters include thorn (þ) – a soft “th” sound – and Wynn (ƿ), which was replaced by “uu”, before this was superseded by “w”. Ethel (Œ) – pronounced like the “oi” in “oil” – has also been lost, in favor of using vowel combinations to get the same job done. Yogh (ȝ) was briefly a way to denote the “ch” sounds, as found at the end of “loch”, but was soon abandoned, and the specific sound it denotes rarely used in English anymore.