[TomMckenny]

A symbol for "or" would be so extremely sensible in this pattern.

And there was one.

Just as "&" abbreviated "et", a-sort-of-i-thingy abbreviated "vel"(= "or"). I have no idea why only "&" thrived and the "or" one faded. Now it's long forgotten, hiding at Unicode point U+026B

[pjungwir]

Interesting, thanks for sharing that! I once spent a summer helping a library write one-sentence summaries for medieval Latin books, and all the abbreviations and ligatures made the paleography really tough! But actually we do have a common symbol for "or". I used it once in that comment, but then I switched to "|" for fun: "/".