
…idely used that children in school, when reciting the alphabet, would include & after the letter Z. The result of this was that phonetically you would hear “X, Y, Z and per se and” indicating that the & stood by itself at the end of the alphabet. The phrase “and per se and” was inevitably slurred into one single term and by 1837, the term ampe…
By the early seventeen hundreds, schools throughout England had started to use the phrase per se (essentially meaning by itself) when spelling out words. This was specifically useful when encountering words that consist of only a single letter (A, I and originally O).
As an example, in order to spell the phrase “I invite you”, children would say: