What 🙰 means
It is a decorative joining sign that means “and.”
A ligature joins two letters into one written form; this one stylizes e and t from Latin et. Joined et forms appear in first-century Roman writing. Medieval and Renaissance scribes and printers reshaped them to write faster, save space, and remain legible at small sizes. The ordinary ampersand also grew from joined et, but 🙰 is a separate decorative Unicode character.
Use it for display styling, such as a title or a pair of names. The ordinary ampersand’s place in running text depends on language: German guidance generally reserves it for names, while English and French use it more freely.
Why does 🙰 look different?
The active font supplies its shape.
One font may draw a flowing form; another may show a missing-character box or a fallback. Those display changes do not change its “and” reading.
Similar Wingdings and Webdings symbols could be stored in private-use slots reserved for a font or reached through font menus. The 2011 proposal for encoding them describes that setup; switching to one of those fonts alone can yield a different character.
This is a display flourish; it still joins words or names with the ordinary meaning “and.”
Use & when readers need dependable font support; 🙰 may be missing from their typeface.
Part of collections
Don't confuse it with
1
Related characters
3
Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
1Why does 🙰 show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
More like this
11
How to type or find 🙰
- Also called
- italic ampersand lowercase
- Search it as
- ampersand · script ampersand · curly ampersand · ornamental ampersand · et ligature · Latin et
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
🙰\1F670Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.