Move over Ampersand, You've been replaced.

I don't know how often you use the ampersand, but I tend to use it a lot. It just generally saves space as well as makes typing faster. It's definitely useful since "and" is a word that most people tend to use often! However, did you know that "and" is not the most popular article in the English language? The most popular article is "the"! So why isn't there some sort of abbreviation for it?

Well actually, there is.

Or rather, there HAVE been.

In Old

English, the "barred thorn" was used to represent the word þæt, the Old English word for "the" or "that".

This abbreviation gave way to a few new ones once the language passed into the time of Middle English. This was bound to happen since the word

for "the" and "that" changed from þæt to þe and þat. The abbrevations became þͤ and þͭ.

Due to the letter thorn looking similar to the letter "y" on block-style printing presses. The word "the" became the word "ye" for a very short

period of time during the Early Modern English era. (This is why archaic style names often use "ye" instead of "the" in their titles. E.g. "Ye Olde Shoppe"). This caused the abbreviations yͤ and yͭ to come into use. This abbreviation can still be found in copies

of the 1611 edition of the King James Bible or in the Mayflower Compact. The abbreviation

was never pronounced with a "y" sound, even when it was written.

Another proposal came in 1916, when Lucien Alphonse Legros and John Cameron Grant included the character (Ħħ) in their classic printers' handbook Typographical Printing-Surfaces. This abbreviation never caught on (obviously) and has long since been forgotten.

Finally, we reached the 21st century and we had somehow lost all of our abbreviations for one of the most pivitol words in our language. Well, at least, until 2013 when an Australian restaurateur named Paul Mathis proposed a new symbol to represent "the". He called it The Tap (Ћ). The Verge comments that "Mathis has invested around $38,000AUD (roughly $34,000) over the last two years, (with the vast majority of the money going towards web design and app development) into developing the symbol, and believes it will save us all lots of time." and also that "to hammer his point home, Mathis has crafted a range of Android keyboards called "THE Keyboard," which all include the Ћ symbol. The most expensive (and convoluted) of the keyboards also includes shortcuts for the 14 next most-used words in the English language."

Hopefully, Mathis' efforts will pave a way for new symbols to be developed to aid all of us in our efforts to effectively convey messages in 140 characters, as well as usher English into a new era that can be freely molded by the impending technological revolution.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_articles

http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/5/4495178/paul-mathis-the-symbol-th-android-keyboard-range