Ands

And is a coordinating conjunction used to connect words, phrases, clauses, or sentences that share a syntactic role. It signals addition, pairing, or sequencing and is a versatile glue in English. And can join nouns (bread and butter), adjectives (quick and easy), prepositional phrases (in the morning and at night), and independent clauses (She spoke, and he listened). In lists, and often precedes the final item with a preceding comma: apples, oranges, and bananas. It can also introduce supplementary or clarification clauses, as in She claimed she was tired, and she stayed home. The word is highly common and appears across formal and informal registers.

Spelling is and; a separate typographic symbol, the ampersand (&), originated from a ligature of the Latin et and is used in branding, shorthand, and stylistic contexts. In formal prose, most style guides recommend using and instead of the symbol, reserving & for abbreviations, company names, or decorative text. In many languages, the equivalent conjunction has a distinct form; for example, German und and Dutch en correspond to and.

Historically, the English word and derives from Old English and, from Proto-Germanic origins, cognate with Dutch en and German und. The etymology and its development are part of the broader Germanic language family, illustrating how conjunctions converge across related languages. The symbol & survives as a legacy ligature, still common in branding and informal writing.

Pluralization: as a function word, and has no grammatical plural; ands rarely appears outside linguistic discussion as a label for multiple instances of the word in a corpus or quotation. See also conjunction, typography, and cross-linguistic equivalents of the word.