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87-470: The ampersand , also known as the and sign , is the logogram & , representing the conjunction "and". It originated as a ligature of the letters of the word et ( Latin for "and"). Ampersand : the sign & ; the name being a corruption of 'and per se = and'; i.e. ' & by itself = and'. The sign derives from the scribes' ligature for the Latin : et ; in certain italic versions,

174-410: A difference . Their use has been extended to many other meanings, more or less analogous. Plus and minus are Latin terms meaning "more" and "less", respectively. The forms ⟨+⟩ and ⟨−⟩ are used in many countries around the world. Other designs include ⟨ ﬩ ⟩ for plus and ⟨ ⁒ ⟩ for minus. Though the signs now seem as familiar as

261-440: A formal parameter of a function denotes pass-by-reference . In Pascal , the & as the first character of an identifier prevents the compiler from treating it as a keyword, thus escaping it. In Fortran , the ampersand forces the compiler to treat two lines as one. This is accomplished by placing an ampersand at the end of the first line and at the beginning of the second line. In many implementations of ALGOL 60

348-618: A ligature (Evolution of the ampersand – figure 1). In the later and more flowing New Roman Cursive, ligatures of all kinds were extremely common; figures 2 and 3 from the middle of 4th century are examples of how the et-ligature could look in this script. During the later development of the Latin script leading up to Carolingian minuscule (9th century) the use of ligatures in general diminished. The et-ligature, however, continued to be used and gradually became more stylized and less revealing of its origin (figures 4–6). The modern italic type ampersand

435-523: A closer collaboration than and . The ampersand is used by the Writers Guild of America to denote two writers collaborating on a specific script, rather than one writer rewriting another's work. In screenplays, two authors joined with & collaborated on the script, while two authors joined with and worked on the script at different times and may not have consulted each other at all. In the latter case, they both contributed enough significant material to

522-449: A disadvantage for processing homophones in English. The processing disadvantage in English is usually described in terms of the relative lack of homophones in the English language. When a homophonic word is encountered, the phonological representation of that word is first activated. However, since this is an ambiguous stimulus, a matching at the orthographic/lexical ("mental dictionary") level

609-422: A disadvantage in processing, as has been the case with English homophones, but found no evidence for this. It is evident that there is a difference in how homophones are processed in logographically coded and alphabetically coded languages, but whether the advantage for processing of homophones in the logographically coded languages Japanese and Chinese (i.e. their writing systems) is due to the logographic nature of

696-506: A fixed combination of a radical that indicates its nominal category, plus a phonetic to give an idea of the pronunciation. The Mayan system used logograms with phonetic complements like the Egyptian, while lacking ideographic components. Chinese scholars have traditionally classified the Chinese characters ( hànzì ) into six types by etymology. The first two types are "single-body", meaning that

783-463: A macro parameter or text macro name with its actual value. Ampersand is the name of a reactive programming language, which uses relation algebra to specify information systems . In SGML , XML , and HTML , the ampersand is used to introduce an SGML entity , such as   (for non-breaking space) or α (for the Greek letter α). The HTML and XML encoding for the ampersand character

870-422: A move that puts the opponent into check , while a double plus ++ is sometimes used to denote double check . Combinations of the plus and minus signs are used to evaluate a move (+/−, +/=, =/+, −/+). In linguistics, a superscript plus sometimes replaces the asterisk , which denotes unattested linguistic reconstruction . In botanical names , a plus sign denotes graft-chimaera . In Catholicism,

957-653: A partnership of two or more people, such as Johnson & Johnson , Dolce & Gabbana , Marks & Spencer , and Tiffany & Co. , as well as some abbreviations containing the word and , such as AT&T ( American Telephone and Telegraph ), A&P (supermarkets), P&O (originally "Peninsular and Oriental", shipping and logistics company), R&D ( research and development ), D&B ( drum and bass ), D&D ( Dungeons & Dragons ), R&B ( rhythm and blues ), B&B ( bed and breakfast ), and P&L ( profit and loss ). In film credits for stories, screenplays , etc., & indicates

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1044-513: A pattern to be matched. For example, x+ means "one or more of the letter x". This is the Kleene plus notation. There is no concept of negative zero in mathematics, but in computing −0 may have a separate representation from zero. In the IEEE floating-point standard , 1 / −0 is negative infinity ( − ∞ {\displaystyle -\infty } ) whereas 1 / 0

1131-655: A picture of an elephant, which is pronounced zou in Japanese, before being presented with the Chinese character 造 , which is also read zou . No effect of phonologically related context pictures were found for the reaction times for reading Chinese words. A comparison of the (partially) logographically coded languages Japanese and Chinese is interesting because whereas the Japanese language consists of more than 60% homographic heterophones (characters that can be read two or more different ways), most Chinese characters only have one reading. Because both languages are logographically coded,

1218-497: A plus or minus to indicate the presence or absence of the Rh factor . For example, A+ means type A blood with the Rh factor present, while B− means type B blood with the Rh factor absent. In music, augmented chords are symbolized with a plus sign, although this practice is not universal (as there are other methods for spelling those chords). For example, "C+" is read "C augmented chord". Sometimes

1305-666: A positive or negative charge of 1 (e.g., NH + 4   ). If the charge is greater than 1, a number indicating the charge is written before the sign (as in SO 2− 4   ). A plus sign prefixed to a telephone number is used to indicate the form used for International Direct Dialing . Its precise usage varies by technology and national standards. In the International Phonetic Alphabet , subscripted plus and minus signs are used as diacritics to indicate advanced or retracted articulations of speech sounds. The minus sign

1392-458: A practical limitation in the number of input keys. There exist various input methods for entering logograms, either by breaking them up into their constituent parts such as with the Cangjie and Wubi methods of typing Chinese, or using phonetic systems such as Bopomofo or Pinyin where the word is entered as pronounced and then selected from a list of logograms matching it. While the former method

1479-429: A recent reconstruction by William H. Baxter and Laurent Sagart – but sound changes in the intervening 3,000 years or so (including two different dialectal developments, in the case of the last two characters) have resulted in radically different pronunciations. Within the context of the Chinese language, Chinese characters (known as hanzi ) by and large represent words and morphemes rather than pure ideas; however,

1566-460: A relatively robust immunity to the effect of context stimuli, Verdschot et al. found that Japanese homophones seem particularly sensitive to these types of effects. Specifically, reaction times were shorter when participants were presented with a phonologically related picture before being asked to read a target character out loud. An example of a phonologically related stimulus from the study would be for instance when participants were presented with

1653-575: A script; the question mark , or query mark, ? , is used to indicate the start of a query string. A query string is usually made up of a number of different name–value pairs , each separated by the ampersand symbol, & . For example, http://www.example.org/list.php?order=ascending&year=2024 . Logogram Logographic systems include the earliest writing systems; the first historical civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica used some form of logographic writing. All logographic scripts ever used for natural languages rely on

1740-429: A semantic/ideographic component (see ideogram ), called "determinatives" in the case of Egyptian and "radicals" in the case of Chinese. Typical Egyptian usage was to augment a logogram, which may potentially represent several words with different pronunciations, with a determinate to narrow down the meaning, and a phonetic component to specify the pronunciation. In the case of Chinese, the vast majority of characters are

1827-532: A separate green thread upon application of a function. In more recent years, the ampersand has made its way into the Haskell standard library, representing flipped function application : x & f means the same thing as f x . Perl uses the ampersand as a sigil to refer to subroutines: In MASM 80x86 Assembly Language, & is the Substitution Operator, which tells the assembler to replace

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1914-552: A shortcut equivalent to pressing that button. A double ampersand is needed in order to display a real ampersand. This convention originated in the first WIN32 api, and is used in Windows Forms , (but not WPF, which uses underscore _ for this purpose) and is also copied into many other toolkits on multiple operating systems. Sometimes this causes problems similar to other programs that fail to sanitize markup from user input, for instance Navision databases have trouble if this character

2001-537: A significant extent in writing even if they do not write in Standard Chinese . Therefore, in China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan before modern times, communication by writing ( 筆談 ) was the norm of East Asian international trade and diplomacy using Classical Chinese . This separation, however, also has the great disadvantage of requiring the memorization of the logograms when learning to read and write, separately from

2088-866: A two-million-word sample. As for the case of traditional Chinese characters, 4,808 characters are listed in the " Chart of Standard Forms of Common National Characters " ( 常用國字標準字體表 ) by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China , while 4,759 in the " List of Graphemes of Commonly-Used Chinese Characters " ( 常用字字形表 ) by the Education and Manpower Bureau of Hong Kong , both of which are intended to be taught during elementary and junior secondary education. Education after elementary school includes not as many new characters as new words, which are mostly combinations of two or more already learned characters. Entering complex characters can be cumbersome on electronic devices due to

2175-455: Is ⇧ Shift + 7 . It is almost always available on keyboard layouts, sometimes on ⇧ Shift + 6 or ⇧ Shift + 8 . On the AZERTY keyboard layout, & is an unmodified keystroke, positioned above A . In URLs , the ampersand must be replaced by %26 when representing a string character to avoid interpretation as a URL syntax character . In the 20th century, following

2262-414: Is positive infinity ( ∞ {\displaystyle \infty } ). + is also used to denote added lines in diff output in the context format or the unified format . In physics, the use of plus and minus signs for different electrical charges was introduced by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg . In chemistry, superscripted plus and minus signs are used to indicate an ion with

2349-449: Is (linearly) faster, it is more difficult to learn. With the Chinese alphabet system however, the strokes forming the logogram are typed as they are normally written, and the corresponding logogram is then entered. Also due to the number of glyphs, in programming and computing in general, more memory is needed to store each grapheme, as the character set is larger. As a comparison, ISO 8859 requires only one byte for each grapheme, while

2436-511: Is a kind of " et " ligature that goes back to the cursive scripts developed during the Renaissance . After the advent of printing in Europe in 1455, printers made extensive use of both the italic and Roman ampersands. Since the ampersand's roots go back to Roman times, many languages that use a variation of the Latin alphabet make use of it. The ampersand often appeared as a character at the end of

2523-442: Is a simplification of the Latin : et (comparable to the evolution of the ampersand & ). The − may be derived from a macron ◌̄ written over ⟨m⟩ when used to indicate subtraction; or it may come from a shorthand version of the letter ⟨m⟩ itself. In his 1489 treatise, Johannes Widmann referred to the symbols − and + as minus and mer (Modern German mehr ; "more"): "[...]

2610-415: Is also used as tone letter in the orthographies of Dan , Krumen , Karaboro , Mwan , Wan , Yaouré , Wè , Nyabwa and Godié . The Unicode character used for the tone letter (U+02D7) is different from the mathematical minus sign. The plus sign sometimes represents / ɨ / in the orthography of Huichol . In the algebraic notation used to record games of chess , the plus sign + is used to denote

2697-403: Is also used in chemistry and physics . For more, see § Other uses . The minus sign ( − ) has three main uses in mathematics: In many contexts, it does not matter whether the second or the third of these usages is intended: −5 is the same number. When it is important to distinguish them, a raised minus sign ( ¯ ) is sometimes used for negative constants, as in elementary education ,

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2784-584: Is an example of an alphabetic script that was designed to replace the logogrammatic hanja in order to increase literacy. The latter is now rarely used, but retains some currency in South Korea, sometimes in combination with hangul. According to government-commissioned research, the most commonly used 3,500 characters listed in the People's Republic of China 's " Chart of Common Characters of Modern Chinese " ( 现代汉语常用字表 , Xiàndài Hànyǔ Chángyòngzì Biǎo ) cover 99.48% of

2871-515: Is generally called "minus five degrees".) Further, a few textbooks in the United States encourage − x to be read as "the opposite of x " or "the additive inverse of x "—to avoid giving the impression that − x is necessarily negative (since x itself may already be negative). In mathematics and most programming languages, the rules for the order of operations mean that −5 is equal to −25 : Exponentiation binds more strongly than

2958-475: Is in either "Text" or "Code" fields. Some Unix shells use the ampersand as a metacharacter : Some Unix shells, like the POSIX standard sh shell, use an ampersand to execute a process in the background and to duplicate file descriptors . The generic URL (Uniform Resource Locator) syntax allows for a query string to be appended to a file name in a web address so that additional information can be passed to

3045-471: Is necessary before the stimulus can be disambiguated, and the correct pronunciation can be chosen. In contrast, in a language (such as Chinese) where many characters with the same reading exists, it is hypothesized that the person reading the character will be more familiar with homophones, and that this familiarity will aid the processing of the character, and the subsequent selection of the correct pronunciation, leading to shorter reaction times when attending to

3132-467: Is often informally used in place of an ampersand, sometimes with an added loop and resembling ɬ . Other times it is a single stroke with a diagonal line connecting the bottom to the left side. This was a version of shorthand for ampersand, and the stroke economy of this version provided ease of writing for workers while also assuring the character was distinct from other numeric or alphabetic symbols. Ampersands are commonly seen in business names formed from

3219-411: Is often pronounced "and," but is not related to the ampersand. In everyday handwriting , the ampersand is sometimes simplified in design as a large lowercase epsilon Ɛ or a reversed numeral 3 , superimposed by a vertical line. The ampersand is also sometimes shown as an epsilon with a vertical line above and below it or a dot above and below it. The plus sign + (itself based on an et-ligature)

3306-409: Is the entity & . This can create a problem known as delimiter collision when converting text into one of these markup languages. For instance, when putting URLs or other material containing ampersands into XML format files such as RSS files the & must be replaced with & or they are considered not well formed, and computers will be unable to read the files correctly. SGML derived

3393-413: Is the only character that resembles a minus sign or a dash so it is also used for these. The name hyphen-minus derives from the original ASCII standard, where it was called hyphen–(minus) . The character is referred to as a hyphen , a minus sign , or a dash according to the context where it is being used. A Jewish tradition that dates from at least the 19th century is to write plus using

3480-685: Is to use "x" as a prefix to denote hexadecimal, thus xFF .) Some other languages, such as the Monitor built into ROM on the Commodore 128 , used it to indicate octal instead, a convention that spread throughout the Commodore community and is now used in the VICE emulator. In MySQL , & has dual roles. As well as a logical AND, it serves as the bitwise operator of an intersection between elements. Dyalog APL uses ampersand similarly to Unix shells , spawning

3567-595: Is used. The character in Unicode is U+0026 & AMPERSAND ( &, & ); this is inherited from the same value in ASCII . Apart from this, Unicode also has the following variants: The last six of these are carryovers from the Wingdings fonts, and are meant only for backward compatibility with those fonts. On the QWERTY keyboard layout , the ampersand

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3654-534: The Arab conquest of Persia and the adoption of a variant of the Arabic alphabet . All historical logographic systems include a phonetic dimension, as it is impractical to have a separate basic character for every word or morpheme in a language. In some cases, such as cuneiform as it was used for Akkadian, the vast majority of glyphs are used for their sound values rather than logographically. Many logographic systems also have

3741-526: The Basic Multilingual Plane encoded in UTF-8 requires up to three bytes. On the other hand, English words, for example, average five characters and a space per word and thus need six bytes for every word. Since many logograms contain more than one grapheme, it is not clear which is more memory-efficient. Variable-width encodings allow a unified character encoding standard such as Unicode to use only

3828-474: The alphabet or the Hindu–Arabic numerals , they are not of great antiquity. The Egyptian hieroglyphic sign for addition, for example, resembled a pair of legs walking in the direction in which the text was written ( Egyptian could be written either from right to left or left to right), with the reverse sign indicating subtraction: Nicole Oresme 's manuscripts from the 14th century show what may be one of

3915-434: The cmti # (text italic) fonts, so it can be entered as {\it\&} in running text when using the default (Computer Modern) fonts. In Microsoft Windows menus, labels, and other captions, the ampersand is used to denote the next letter as a keyboard shortcut (called an "Access key" by Microsoft). For instance setting a button label to "&Print" makes it display as P rint and for Alt + P to be

4002-400: The negative numbers ( +5 versus −5 ). The plus sign can also indicate many other operations, depending on the mathematical system under consideration. Many algebraic structures , such as vector spaces and matrix rings , have some operation which is called, or is equivalent to, addition. It is though conventional to use the plus sign to only denote commutative operations . The symbol

4089-613: The rebus principle to extend a relatively limited set of logograms: A subset of characters is used for their phonetic values, either consonantal or syllabic. The term logosyllabary is used to emphasize the partially phonetic nature of these scripts when the phonetic domain is the syllable. In Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs , Ch'olti', and in Chinese, there has been the additional development of determinatives , which are combined with logograms to narrow down their possible meaning. In Chinese, they are fused with logographic elements used phonetically; such " radical and phonetic" characters make up

4176-456: The "and" to be spelled.) The phrase et cetera ("and the rest"), usually written as etc. can be abbreviated &c. representing the combination et + c(etera) . The ampersand can be used to indicate that the "and" in a listed item is a part of the item's name and not a separator (e.g. "Rock, pop, rhythm & blues and hip hop"). The ampersand may still be used as an abbreviation for "and" in informal writing regardless of how "and"

4263-472: The ASCII hyphen-minus character, - . In APL a raised minus sign (here written using Unicode U+00AF MACRON) is used to denote a negative number, as in ¯3 . While in J a negative number is denoted by an underscore , as in _5 . In C and some other computer programming languages, two plus signs indicate the increment operator and two minus signs a decrement; the position of the operator before or after

4350-780: The Latin alphabet, as for example in Byrhtferð's list of letters from 1011. Similarly, & was regarded as the 27th letter of the English alphabet , as taught to children in the US and elsewhere. An example may be seen in M. B. Moore's 1863 book The Dixie Primer, for the Little Folks . In her 1859 novel Adam Bede , George Eliot refers to this when she makes Jacob Storey say: "He thought it [Z] had only been put to finish off th' alphabet like; though ampusand would ha' done as well, for what he could see." The popular nursery rhyme Apple Pie ABC finishes with

4437-484: The Old Chinese difference between type-A and type-B syllables (often described as presence vs. absence of palatalization or pharyngealization ); and sometimes, voicing of initial obstruents and/or the presence of a medial /r/ after the initial consonant. In earlier times, greater phonetic freedom was generally allowed. During Middle Chinese times, newly created characters tended to match pronunciation exactly, other than

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4524-494: The adoption of Chinese characters by the Japanese and Korean languages (where they are known as kanji and hanja , respectively) have resulted in some complications to this picture. Many Chinese words, composed of Chinese morphemes, were borrowed into Japanese and Korean together with their character representations; in this case, the morphemes and characters were borrowed together. In other cases, however, characters were borrowed to represent native Japanese and Korean morphemes, on

4611-458: The ampersand denotes the tens exponent of a real number. In Common Lisp , the ampersand is the prefix for lambda list keywords. Ampersand is the string concatenation operator in many BASIC dialects , AppleScript , Lingo , HyperTalk , and FileMaker . In Ada it applies to all one-dimensional arrays, not just strings. BASIC-PLUS on the DEC PDP-11 uses the ampersand as a short form of

4698-436: The basis of meaning alone. As a result, a single character can end up representing multiple morphemes of similar meaning but with different origins across several languages. Because of this, kanji and hanja are sometimes described as morphographic writing systems. Because much research on language processing has centered on English and other alphabetically written languages, many theories of language processing have stressed

4785-423: The bulk of the script. Ancient Egyptian and Chinese relegated the active use of rebus to the spelling of foreign and dialectical words. Logoconsonantal scripts have graphemes that may be extended phonetically according to the consonants of the words they represent, ignoring the vowels. For example, Egyptian was used to write both sȝ 'duck' and sȝ 'son', though it is likely that these words were not pronounced

4872-423: The bytes necessary to represent a character, reducing the overhead that results merging large character sets with smaller ones. Plus sign The plus sign ( + ) and the minus sign ( − ) are mathematical symbols used to denote positive and negative functions, respectively. In addition, + represents the operation of addition , which results in a sum , while − represents subtraction , resulting in

4959-400: The character was created independently of other characters. "Single-body" pictograms and ideograms make up only a small proportion of Chinese logograms. More productive for the Chinese script were the two "compound" methods, i.e. the character was created from assembling different characters. Despite being called "compounds", these logograms are still single characters, and are written to take up

5046-403: The correct pronunciation. This hypothesis is confirmed by studies finding that Japanese Alzheimer's disease patients whose comprehension of characters had deteriorated still could read the words out loud with no particular difficulty. Studies contrasting the processing of English and Chinese homophones in lexical decision tasks have found an advantage for homophone processing in Chinese, and

5133-498: The development of formal logic , the ampersand became a commonly used logical notation for the binary operator or sentential connective AND . This usage was adopted in computing. Many languages with syntax derived from C , including C++ , Perl , and more differentiate between: In C , C++ , and Go , a prefix & is a unary operator denoting the address in memory of the argument, e.g. &x, &func, &a[3] . In C++ and PHP , unary prefix & before

5220-444: The difference in latency in reading aloud Japanese and Chinese due to context effects cannot be ascribed to the logographic nature of the writing systems. Instead, the authors hypothesize that the difference in latency times is due to additional processing costs in Japanese, where the reader cannot rely solely on a direct orthography-to-phonology route, but information on a lexical-syntactical level must also be accessed in order to choose

5307-568: The earliest uses of + as a sign for plus. In early 15th century Europe, the letters "P" and "M" were generally used. The symbols (P with overline, p̄ , for più (more), i.e., plus, and M with overline, m̄ , for meno (less), i.e., minus) appeared for the first time in Luca Pacioli 's mathematics compendium , Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalità , first printed and published in Venice in 1494. The + sign

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5394-763: The first five phases of the Bamum script . A peculiar system of logograms developed within the Pahlavi scripts (developed from the abjad of Aramaic ) used to write Middle Persian during much of the Sassanid period ; the logograms were composed of letters that spelled out the word in Aramaic but were pronounced as in Persian (for instance, the combination m-l-k would be pronounced "shah"). These logograms, called hozwārishn (a form of heterograms ), were dispensed with altogether after

5481-412: The first is made thus + and betokeneth more: the other is thus made − and betokeneth lesse." The plus sign ( + ) is a binary operator that indicates addition , as in 2 + 3 = 5 . It can also serve as a unary operator that leaves its operand unchanged ( + x means the same as x ). This notation may be used when it is desired to emphasize the positiveness of a number, especially in contrast with

5568-446: The letters e and t are clearly distinguishable. Traditionally in English, when spelling aloud, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself ("A", "I", and " O ") was referred to by the Latin expression per se ('by itself'), as in " per se A" or "A per se A". The character &, when used by itself as opposed to more extended forms such as &c. , was similarly referred to as "and per se and". This last phrase

5655-608: The lines "X, Y, Z, and ampersand, All wished for a piece in hand". In Irish and Scottish Gaelic , the character ⁊ ( U+204A ⁊ TIRONIAN SIGN ET ) is used in place of the ampersand. This character is a survival of Tironian notes , a medieval shorthand system. This character is known as the Tironian Et in English, the agus in Irish, and the agusan in Scottish Gaelic. The logical conjunction symbol, ∧ ,

5742-412: The operation of subtraction. The same convention is also used in some computer languages. For example, subtracting −5 from 3 might be read as "positive three take away negative 5", and be shown as which can be read as: or even as When placed after a number, a plus sign can indicate an open range of numbers. For example, "18+" is commonly used as shorthand for "ages 18 and up". In US grading systems,

5829-496: The plus is written as a superscript . As well as the normal mathematical usage, plus and minus signs may be used for a number of other purposes in computing. Plus and minus signs are often used in tree view on a computer screen—to show if a folder is collapsed or not. In some programming languages, concatenation of strings is written "a" + "b" , and results in "ab" . In most programming languages, subtraction and negation are indicated with

5916-600: The plus sign before a last name denotes a Bishop , and a double plus is used to denote an Archbishop. Variants of the symbols have unique codepoints in Unicode: There is a commercial minus sign , ⁒ , which is used in Germany and Scandinavia. The symbol ÷ is used to denote subtraction in Scandinavia . The hyphen-minus symbol ( - ) is the form of hyphen most commonly used in digital documents . On most keyboards, it

6003-450: The plus sign indicates a grade one level higher and the minus sign a grade lower. For example, B− ("B minus") is one grade lower than B . In some occasions, this is extended to two plus or minus signs (e.g., A++ being two grades higher than A ). A common trend in branding, particularly with streaming video services, has been the use of the plus sign at the end of brand names, e.g. Google+ , Disney+ , Paramount+ and Apple TV+ . Since

6090-463: The practical compromise of standardizing how words are written while maintaining a nearly one-to-one relation between characters and sounds. Orthographies in some other languages, such as English , French , Thai and Tibetan , are all more complicated than that; character combinations are often pronounced in multiple ways, usually depending on their history. Hangul , the Korean language 's writing system,

6177-408: The programming language APL , and some early graphing calculators. All three uses can be referred to as "minus" in everyday speech, though the binary operator is sometimes read as "take away". In American English nowadays, −5 (for example) is generally referred to as "negative five" though speakers born before 1950 often refer to it as "minus five". (Temperatures tend to follow the older usage; −5°

6264-471: The pronunciation. Though not from an inherent feature of logograms but due to its unique history of development, Japanese has the added complication that almost every logogram has more than one pronunciation. Conversely, a phonetic character set is written precisely as it is spoken, but with the disadvantage that slight pronunciation differences introduce ambiguities. Many alphabetic systems such as those of Greek , Latin , Italian , Spanish , and Finnish make

6351-535: The role of hemispheric lateralization in orthographically versus phonetically coded languages. Another topic that has been given some attention is differences in processing of homophones. Verdonschot et al. examined differences in the time it took to read a homophone out loud when a picture that was either related or unrelated to a homophonic character was presented before the character. Both Japanese and Chinese homophones were examined. Whereas word production of alphabetically coded languages (such as English) has shown

6438-903: The role of phonology in producing speech. Contrasting logographically coded languages, where a single character is represented phonetically and ideographically, with phonetically/phonemically spelled languages has yielded insights into how different languages rely on different processing mechanisms. Studies on the processing of logographically coded languages have amongst other things looked at neurobiological differences in processing, with one area of particular interest being hemispheric lateralization. Since logographically coded languages are more closely associated with images than alphabetically coded languages, several researchers have hypothesized that right-side activation should be more prominent in logographically coded languages. Although some studies have yielded results consistent with this hypothesis there are too many contrasting results to make any final conclusions about

6525-701: The same amount of space as any other logogram. The final two types are methods in the usage of characters rather than the formation of characters themselves. The most productive method of Chinese writing, the radical-phonetic, was made possible by ignoring certain distinctions in the phonetic system of syllables. In Old Chinese , post-final ending consonants /s/ and /ʔ/ were typically ignored; these developed into tones in Middle Chinese , which were likewise ignored when new characters were created. Also ignored were differences in aspiration (between aspirated vs. unaspirated obstruents , and voiced vs. unvoiced sonorants);

6612-488: The same except for their consonants. The primary examples of logoconsonantal scripts are Egyptian hieroglyphs , hieratic , and demotic : Ancient Egyptian . Logosyllabic scripts have graphemes which represent morphemes, often polysyllabic morphemes, but when extended phonetically represent single syllables. They include cuneiform, Anatolian hieroglyphs , Cretan hieroglyphs , Linear A and Linear B , Chinese characters , Maya script , Aztec script , Mixtec script , and

6699-433: The screenplay to receive credit but did not work together. As a result, both & and and may appear in the same credit, as appropriate to how the writing proceeded. In APA style , the ampersand is used when citing sources in text such as (Jones & Jones, 2005). In the list of references, an ampersand precedes the last author's name when there is more than one author. (This does not apply to MLA style , which calls for

6786-604: The scripts, or if it merely reflects an advantage for languages with more homophones regardless of script nature, remains to be seen. The main difference between logograms and other writing systems is that the graphemes are not linked directly to their pronunciation. An advantage of this separation is that understanding of the pronunciation or language of the writer is unnecessary, e.g. 1 is understood regardless of whether it be called one , ichi or wāḥid by its reader. Likewise, people speaking different varieties of Chinese may not understand each other in speaking, but may do so to

6873-424: The stimulus. In an attempt to better understand homophony effects on processing, Hino et al. conducted a series of experiments using Japanese as their target language. While controlling for familiarity, they found a processing advantage for homophones over non-homophones in Japanese, similar to what has previously been found in Chinese. The researchers also tested whether orthographically similar homophones would yield

6960-774: The tone – often by using as the phonetic component a character that itself is a radical-phonetic compound. Due to the long period of language evolution, such component "hints" within characters as provided by the radical-phonetic compounds are sometimes useless and may be misleading in modern usage. As an example, based on 每 'each', pronounced měi in Standard Mandarin , are the characters 侮 'to humiliate', 悔 'to regret', and 海 'sea', pronounced respectively wǔ , huǐ , and hǎi in Mandarin. Three of these characters were pronounced very similarly in Old Chinese – /mˤəʔ/  (每), /m̥ˤəʔ/  (悔), and /m̥ˤəʔ/  (海) according to

7047-456: The unary minus, which binds more strongly than multiplication or division. However, in some programming languages ( Microsoft Excel in particular), unary operators bind strongest, so in those cases −5^2 is 25, but 0−5^2 is −25. Similar to the plus sign, the minus sign is also used in chemistry and physics . For more, see § Other uses below. Some elementary teachers use raised minus signs before numbers to disambiguate them from

7134-505: The use from IBM Generalized Markup Language , which was one of many IBM-mainframe languages to use the ampersand to signal a text substitution, eventually going back to System/360 macro assembly language. In the plain TeX markup language , the ampersand is used to mark tabstops . The ampersand itself can be applied in TeX with \& . The Computer Modern fonts replace it with an "E.T." symbol in

7221-401: The variable indicates whether the new or old value is read from it. For example, if x equals 6, then y = x++ increments x to 7 but sets y to 6, whereas y = ++x would set both x and y to 7. By extension, ++ is sometimes used in computing terminology to signify an improvement, as in the name of the language C++ . In regular expressions , + is often used to indicate "1 or more" in

7308-532: The verb PRINT . Applesoft BASIC used the ampersand as an internal command, not intended to be used for general programming, that invoked a machine language program in the computer's ROM . In some versions of BASIC, unary suffix & denotes a variable is of type long , or 32 bits in length. The ampersand was occasionally used as a prefix to denote a hexadecimal number, such as &FF for decimal 255, for instance in BBC BASIC . (The modern convention

7395-656: The word "plus" can mean an advantage, or an additional amount of something, such "+" signs imply that a product offers extra features or benefits. Positive and negative are sometimes abbreviated as +ve and −ve . In mathematics the one-sided limit x → a means x approaches a from the right (i.e., right-sided limit), and x → a means x approaches a from the left (i.e., left-sided limit). For example, 1/ x → + ∞ {\displaystyle \infty } as x → 0 but 1/ x → − ∞ {\displaystyle \infty } as x → 0 . Blood types are often qualified with

7482-416: Was routinely slurred to "ampersand", and the term had entered common English usage by 1837. It has been falsely claimed that André-Marie Ampère used the symbol in his widely read publications and that people began calling the new shape "Ampère's and". The ampersand can be traced back to the 1st century AD and the old Roman cursive , in which the letters E and T occasionally were written together to form

7569-499: Was − ist das ist minus [...] und das + das ist mer das zu addirst" . They were not used for addition and subtraction in the treatise, but were used to indicate surplus and deficit; usage in the modern sense is attested in a 1518 book by Henricus Grammateus . Robert Recorde , the designer of the equals sign , introduced plus and minus to Britain in 1557 in The Whetstone of Witte : "There be other 2 signes in often use of which

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