Ampersand

I've always thought this a strange word. The symbol was invented by the Roman scribe Marcus Tullius Tiro in the first century B.C., but it didn’t get its name until much later. In the early 1800s, schoolchildren learned the symbol as the 27th letter of the alphabet: X, Y, Z, &. They ended their ABCs with "and, per se, and" meaning "&, which means ‘and.’" This phrase was slurred into one garbled word. Perhaps Tiro should have come up with something at the time.

Link: http://www.neatorama.com/2007/07/09/
the-origin-of-everyday-punctuation-symbols/