Scribal abbreviations were used by medieval scribes writing in Latin. These were a set of conventional marks to save themselves paper. These often consisted of tildes, macrons, and marks that resembled apostrophes above letters. Other modifications included cross-bars and extended strokes. Such abbreviations were mostly for prefixes and verb, noun, and adjectival suffixes. They are not to be confused with the forms of abbreviation that do not use unusual marks, some of which have survived (such as i.e., loc. cit., and viz).

Scribal abbreviations have entered the news in the twenty-first century because the recently revived Scottish Parliament needs to find out what the old codes of Scottish law written in Latin say. Those who have learned Latin without coming across these marks find them incomprehensible. And at a recent count, there were well over fourteen thousand scribal abbreviations.

Besides scribal abbreviations, in old texts one will find some variant characters called digraphs, the long s, and the half r, which are difficult enough to understand. Also, there were the spelling conventions which in effect confuse "u" with "v" and vice versa, and the same with "i" and "j". Nowadays, variant letters and the scribal abbreviations are systematically replaced with the full Latin spellings by most publishers who still print Latin works, and the confusable letters are rendered such that the characters "j" and "v" are not used for vowels.

One remaining scribal abbreviation is the ampersand, for the Latin (or French) word, et, meaning "and". But even this is too much like a digraph: there were several different ways of making the ampersand. One resembles an Arabic numeral "7", though at x-height. Although in the nineteenth century, the way to write an ampersand was taught, it is not mandated any longer. The last remaining scribal abbreviation is the apostrophe, which originally looked like an Arabic numeral "9", complete with a hollow "bowl".

Technically, the ampersand (&) is a ligature. When printing with movable type appeared in the fifteenth century, founders made many different ligatures to go with each set of type they produced. Such sets were called "record type". Manuscripts of ancient Greek, a language that entered Western Europe with the Renaissance, used similar abbreviations which had to be converted into ligatures as well. This was to imitate the scribal form of writing to which the readership was accustomed. But the scribal abbreviations did not apply to the vernacular languages of Europe. As works got published in these languages, a development that is often imagined as being due to the Reformation, scribal abbreviations disappeared.