a letter or a letter-set also was so used, becoming a universal medieval typographic usage. Likewise the tilde (~), an undulated, curved-end line, came into standard late-medieval usage. Besides the tilde and macron marks above and below letters, modifying cross-bars and extended strokes were employed as scribal abbreviation marks, mostly for prefixes and verb, noun and adjective suffixes. The typographic abbreviations should not be confused with the phrasal abbreviations: i.e. ( 'that is'); loc. cit. ( 'in the passage already cited'); viz. ( 'namely; that is to say; in other words' – formed with vi + the yogh-like glyph ꝫ, the siglum for the suffix -et and the conjunction ); and etc. (et cetera 'and so on'). Moreover, besides scribal abbreviations, ancient texts also contained variant typographic characters, including ligatures (Æ, Œ, etc.), the long s (ſ), and the r rotunda (ꝛ). The u and v characters originated as scribal variants for their respective letters, likewise the i and j pair. Modern publishers printing Latin-language works replace variant typography and sigla with full-form Latin spellings; the convention of using u and i for vowels and v and j for consonants is a late typographic development. Scribal sigla in modern use Latin script Some ancient and medieval sigla are still used in English and other European languages; the Latin ampersand (&) replaces the conjunction and in English, in Latin and French, and in Spanish (but its use in Spanish is frowned upon, since the y is already smaller and easier to write). The Tironian sign (⁊), resembling the digit seven (7), represents the conjunction et and is written only to the x-height; in current Irish language usage, the siglum denotes the conjunction ('and'). Other scribal abbreviations in modern typographic use are the percentage sign (%), from the Italian ('per hundred'); the permille sign (‰), from the Italian ('per thousand'); the pound sign (₤, £ and #, all descending from or lb for ) and the dollar sign ($), which possibly derives from the Spanish word . The commercial at symbol (@), originally denoting 'at the rate/price of', is an abbreviation of the word Amphora—a kind of pot used as a unit of trade; from the 1990s, its use outside commerce became widespread, as part of e-mail addresses. Typographically, the ampersand, representing the word et, is a space-saving ligature of the letters e and t, its component graphemes. Since the establishment of