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Introducing the Andorsand; the interobang for and/or statements

Update: Andorsand enamel pins now available from DoctorPopular.com!

Sometimes I’ll go to great lengths to avoid doing my actual tasks. A couple days ago, while I was supposed to be working on maps and music projects for our SquirrelWarz game, I became obsessed with this idea that the world needs a symbol for “and/or” statements. So I created a mockup and tweeted this post:

My original idea was to take the underscore that we’d find in mathematical statements such as (to represent “greater OR equal to”) and combine it with the classic ampersand. Most of the comments, which seemed to come from developers, suggested adding a “|” (also known as a pipe, I believe).

A day later, I shared the andorsand with r/typography, and things went crazy. Many of the redditors loved the idea, but felt like the underlined ampersand looked more like an emphasized statement than what I had intended. In retrospect, :they are totally right. “We should go get cookies AND booze!”.

u/VAPossum created these mock-ups using slashes or exclamation marks, which is cool to see but I think looks more like a “$” symbol than a “&”.

andorsand_mockups

My favorite suggestion came from u/yourotherusername, which had a really clever idea of just adding a tiny “r” to the tail of the ampersand.

andorsand_modified

Not only would this version look great as an additional font, it’s easy to make on sites like Reddit (which uses Markdown) by using superscript… which should also be used on WordPress blogs &r other sites across the web.


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2 responses to “Introducing the Andorsand; the interobang for and/or statements

  1. Daniel Aleksandersen Avatar

    This will never get any adoption as it’s a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist.

    “And/or” should always be written as “or” as that also encompasses “and”. Including an extra “and” is entirely superfluous.

  2. doc Avatar

    It’s been a year or two since I thought about the Andorsand, a silly glyph I concocted for “and/or”, but today I found a song called “Andorsand Interrobang” by Bob Bralove, Henry Kaiser and Chris Muir. It’s a spacey synthy driven instrumental that really slaps:

    The andorsand has also made appearances in this 99% Invisible article and a recent episode of the Secretly Incredibly Fascinating podcast.

    Introducing the Andorsand; the interobang for and/or statements

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