Small Ampersand

﹠ means “and,” like the ordinary ampersand (&). It is a compact form kept for older East Asian text layouts. Its encoding history connects it to Taiwan’s CNS 11643 standard, formally announced in 1986.

Text symbol

What ﹠ means

It means “and”; the small shape changes layout, not meaning.

The ordinary ampersand (&) grew from a Latin et ligature—two joined letters meaning “and”—with examples dating to the first century CE. ﹠ keeps that same meaning.

Taiwan’s CNS 11643 repertoire includes ﹠ among its small ASCII variants, compact forms of basic Latin characters. The glyph stays small inside a fullwidth display cell—the wide character slot used for East Asian text. Unicode retains this form for compatibility with legacy implementations.

Neutral punctuation; its smaller glyph signals a legacy layout convention.

Use & for new prose. NFKC/NFKD normalization—text cleanup that folds compatible forms—can turn ﹠ into &.

Don't confuse it with

＆

Fullwidth Ampersand

The fullwidth ampersand fills a whole wide cell; ﹠ is the small-form variant, drawn more compactly.

Combination ideas

Burger and fries, the classic meal.

Coffee and books: a cozy bio line.

The two of us, said sweetly.

Moon and stars, a dreamy caption.

Questions people ask

Why 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.