| / | |
|---|---|
Slash or solidus | |
| Unicode:U+002F /SOLIDUS (/) |
Theslash is a slanting linepunctuation mark/. It is also known as astroke, asolidus, aforward slash andseveral other historical or technical names. Once used as the equivalent of the modernperiod andcomma, the slash is now used to representdivision andfractions, as adate separator, or to connect alternative terms.
A slash in the reverse direction\ is known as abackslash.
Slashes may be found in early writing as a variant form ofdashes,vertical strokes, etc. The present use of a slash distinguished from such other marks derives from themedieval Europeanvirgule (Latin:virgula,lit. "twig"), which was used as aperiod,scratch comma, andcaesura mark.[1] (The first sense was eventually lost to thelow dot and the other two developed separately into thecomma, andcaesura mark||) Its use as a comma became especially widespread inFrance, where it was also used to mark the continuation of a word onto the next line of a page, a sense later taken on by thehyphen-.[2] TheFraktur script used throughoutCentral Europe in theearly modern period used a single slash as a scratch comma and a double slash// as a dash. The double slash developed into thedouble oblique hyphen⸗ anddouble hyphen⹀ before being usually simplified intovarious single dashes.
In the 18th century, the mark was generally known in English as the "oblique".[3] but particularly the less verticalfraction slash.[4] The variant "oblique stroke" was increasingly shortened to "stroke", which became the common British name for the character, although printers and publishing professionals often instead referred to it as an "oblique". In the 19th and early 20th century, it was also widely known as the "shilling mark" or "solidus", from its use as a notation or abbreviation for theshilling.[5][6] The name "slash" is a recent development, not appearing inWebster's Dictionary until the Third Edition (1961)[7][a] but has gained wide currency through its use incomputing, a context where it is sometimes used in British English in preference to "stroke". Clarifying terms such as "forward slash" have been coined owing to widespread use ofMicrosoft'sDOS andWindowsoperating systems, which use thebackslash extensively.[9][10]
The slash is commonly used in many languages as a shorter substitute for theconjunction "or", typically with the sense ofexclusive or (e.g., Y/N permits yes or no but not both).[11] Its use in this sense is somewhat informal,[12] although it is used inphilology to note variants (e.g.,virgula/uirgula) andetymologies (e.g.,F.virgule/LL.virgula/L.virga/PIE.*wirgā).[2]
Such slashes may be used to avoid taking a position innaming disputes. One example is theAssyrian naming dispute, which prompted theUS andSwedish censuses to use the respective official designations "Assyrian/Chaldean/Syriac" and "Assyrier/Syrianer" for the ethnic group.
In particular, since the late 20th century, the slash is used to permit moregender-neutral language in place of the traditionalmasculine orplural gender neutrals. In the case ofEnglish, this is usually restricted todegendered pronouns such as "he/she" or "s/he". Most otherIndo-European languages include more far-reaching use ofgrammatical gender. In these, the separate gendereddesinences (grammatical suffices) of the words may be given divided by slashes or set off withparentheses. For example, inSpanish,hijo is a son and ahija is a daughter; some proponents of gender-neutral language advocate the use ofhijo/a orhijo(a) when writing for a general audience or addressing a listener of unknown gender.[13][14][15] Less commonly,at sign⟨@⟩ is used instead:hij@. Similarly, inGerman and some Scandinavian and Baltic languages,Sekretär refers to any secretary andSekretärin to an explicitly female secretary; some advocates of gender neutrality support forms such asSekretär/-in for general use. This does not always work smoothly, however: problems arise in the case of words likeArzt ('doctor') where the explicitly female formÄrztin isumlauted and words likeChinese ('Chinese person') where the explicitly female formChinesin loses the terminal-e.
The slash is also used as a shorter substitute for the conjunction "and" orinclusive or (i.e., A or B or both),[12] typically in situations where it fills the role of a hyphen oren dash. For example, the "Hemingway/Faulkner generation" might be used to discuss the era of theLost Generation inclusive of the people around and affected by bothHemingway andFaulkner. This use is sometimes proscribed, as byNew Hart's Rules, the style guide for theOxford University Press.[11]
The slash, as a form of inclusive or, is also used to punctuate the stages of a route (e.g.,Shanghai/Nanjing/Wuhan/Chongqing as stops on a tour of theYangtze).[2]
The wordslash is also developing as a way to introduce topic shifts or follow-up statements.Slash can introduce a follow-up statement, such as, "I really love that hot dog place on Liberty Street. Slash can we go there tomorrow?" It can also indicate a shift to an unrelated topic, as in "JUST SAW ALEX! Slash I just chubbed on oatmeal raisin cookies at north quad and i miss you." The new usage of "slash" appears most frequently in spoken conversation, though it can also appear in writing.[16]
Sometimes the wordslash is used in speech as aconjunction to represent the written role of the character (as if a written slash were being read aloud from text), e.g. "bee slash mosquito protection" for a beekeeper's net hood,[17] and "There's a little bit of nectar slash honey over here, but really it's not a lot." (said by a beekeeper examining in a beehive),[18] and "Gastornis slashDiatryma" for two supposed genera of prehistoric birds which are now thought to be one genus.[19]
The slash is used between two numbers to indicate afraction orratio. Such formatting developed as a way to write the horizontalfraction bar on a single line of text. It is first attested inEngland andMexico in the 18th century.[20] This notation is known as an online, solidus,[21] or shilling fraction.[21] Nowadays fractions, unlike inline division, are often given using smaller numbers,superscript, andsubscript (e.g.,23/43). This notation is responsible for the current form of thepercent⟨%⟩,permille⟨‰⟩, andpermyriad⟨‱⟩ signs, developed from the horizontal form0/0 which represented an early modern corruption of an Italian abbreviation ofper cento.[22]
Unicode provides for a dedicated fraction slash⟨⁄⟩ that is distinct from the ASCII solidus⟨/⟩. Many typefaces draw this fraction slash (and the division slash) at a less vertical angle than the solidus. The separate encoding permits automatic formatting of the preceding and succeeding digits by glyph substitution with numerator and denominator glyphs, which are in turn distinct from superscript and subscript glyphs (e.g., display of "1, fraction slash, 2" as "½", and similarly "123, fraction slash, 456" as "123⁄456").[23] This is supported by an increasing number of environments andcomputer fonts. Because support is not yet universal, some authors still useUnicode subscripts and superscripts to compose fractions, and many computer fonts design these characters for this purpose. In addition,precomposed fractions of the multiples less than 1 of1/n for 2 ≤ n ≤ 6 and n = 8 (e.g. ⅔ and ⅝, as well as ⅐, ⅑, and ⅒, are found in the UnicodeNumber Forms orLatin-1 Supplement blocks.[24]
This notation can also be used when the concept of fractions is extended from numbers to arbitrary rings by the method oflocalization of a ring.
The division slash⟨∕⟩, equivalent to thedivision sign⟨÷⟩, may be used between two numbers to indicatedivision. For example,23 ÷ 43 can also be written as23 ∕ 43. This use developed from thefraction slash in the late 18th or early 19th century.[20] The formatting was advocated byDe Morgan in the mid-19th century.[25][full citation needed]
Aquotient of a set is informally a new set obtained by identifying some elements of the original set. This is denoted as a fraction (sometimes even as a built fraction), where the numerator is the original set (often equipped with some algebraic structure). What is appropriate as denominator depends on the context.
In the most general case, the denominator is anequivalence relation on the original set, and elements are to be identified in the quotient if they are equivalent according to; this is technically achieved by making the set of allequivalence classes of.
Ingroup theory, the slash is used to markquotient groups. The general form is, where is the original group and is the normal subgroup; this is read " mod", where "mod" is short for "modulo". Formally this is a special case of quotient by an equivalence relation, where iff for some. Since many algebraic structures (rings,vector spaces, etc.) in particular are groups, the same style of quotients extend also to these, although the denominator may need to satisfy additionalclosure properties for the quotient to preserve the full algebraic structure of the original (e.g. for the quotient of a ring to be a ring, the denominator must be anideal).
When the original set is the set ofintegers, the denominator may alternatively be just an integer:. This is an alternative notation for the set ofintegers modulon (needed because is also notation for the very differentring ofn-adic integers). is an abbreviation of or, which both are ways of writing the set in question as a quotient of groups.
Slashes may also be used as acombining character in mathematical formulae. The most important use of this is that combining a slash with arelation negates it, producing e.g. 'not equal' as negation of or 'not in' as negation of; these slashed relation symbols are always implicitly defined in terms of the non-slashed base symbol. The graphical form of the negation slash is mostly the same as for a division slash, except in some cases where that would look odd; the negation of (divides) and negation of (various meanings) customarily both have their negations slashes less steep and in particular shorter than the usual one.
TheFeynman slash notation is an unrelated use of combining slashes, mostly seen inquantum field theory. This kind of combining slash takes a vector base symbol and converts it to a matrix quantity. Technically this notation is a shorthand for contracting the vector with theDirac gamma matrices, so; what one gains is not only a more compact formula, but also not having to allocate a letter as the contracted index.
The slash, sometimes distinguished as "forward slash", is used incomputing in a number of ways, primarily as a separator among levels in a given hierarchy, for example in the path of a filesystem.
The slash is used as thepath component separator in manycomputer operating systems (e.g., Unix'spictures/image.png). InUnix andUnix-like systems, such asmacOS andLinux, the slash is also used for thevolumeroot directory (e.g., the initial slash in/usr/john/pictures). Confusion of the slash with the backslash⟨\⟩ largely arises from the use of the latter as the path component separator in the widely used MS-DOS andMicrosoft Windows systems.[9][10]
The slash is used in a similar fashion in internetURLs (e.g.,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_(punctuation)).[11] Often this portion of such URLs corresponds with files on a Unixserver with the same name, and this is where this convention forinternet URLs comes from.
The slash in anIP address (e.g.,192.0.2.0/29) indicates the prefix size inCIDR notation. The number of addresses of asubnet may be calculated as 2address size − prefix size, in which the address size is 128 forIPv6 and 32 forIPv4. For example, in IPv4, the prefix size/29 gives: 232–29 = 23 = 8 addresses.
The slash is used as adivision operator in mostprogramming languages whileAPL uses it for reduction (fold) and compression (filter). The double slash is used byRexx as amodulo operator, andPython (starting in version 2.2) uses a double slash for division which rounds (usingfloor) to an integer. InRaku the double slash is used as a "defined-or" alternative to||. A dot and slash⟨./⟩ is used inMATLAB andGNU Octave to indicate an element-by-element division of matrices.
Comments that begin with/* (a slash and an asterisk) and end with*/ were introduced inPL/I and subsequently adopted bySAS,C, Rexx,C++,Java,JavaScript,PHP,CSS, andC#. A double slash// is also used byC99, C++, C#, PHP, Java,Swift,Pascal and JavaScript to start a single line comment.
InSGML and derived languages such asHTML andXML, a slash is used in closing tags. For example, in HTML,<b> begins a section ofbold text and</b> closes it. In XHTML, slashes are also necessary for "self-closing" elements such as thenewline command<br /> where HTML has simply<br>.
In a style originating in theDigital Equipment Corporation line of operating systems (OS/8,RT-11,TOPS-10, et cetera),Windows,DOS, someCP/M programs,OpenVMS, andOS/2 all use the slash to indicatecommand-line options. For example, the commanddir/w is understood as using the commanddir ("directory") with the "wide" option. No space is required between the command and the switch; this was the reason for the choice to use backslashes as the path separator since one would otherwise be unable to run a program in a different directory.
Slashes are used as the standard delimiters forregular expressions, although other characters can be used instead.
IBM JCL uses a double slash to start each line in a batch job stream except for /* and /&.
IRC and many in-game chat clients use the slash to mark commands, such as joining and leaving a chat room or sending private messages. For example, in IRC,/join #services is a command to join thechannel "services" and/me is a command to format the following message as though it were an action instead of a spoken message. InMinecraft's chat function, the slash is used for executing console and plugin commands. InSecond Life's chat function, the slash is used to select the "communications channel", allowing users to direct commands to virtual objects "listening" on different channels. For example, if a virtual house's lights were set to use channel 42, the command "/42 on" would turn them on. InDiscord, slash commands are used to send special messages and execute commands, like sending ashrug emoji (¯\_(ツ)_/¯) or a table flip emoji ((╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻), or changing one's nickname using "/nick". Slash commands can also be used to use Discord bots.
TheGedcom standard for exchanging computerized genealogical data uses slashes to delimit surnames; an example would be Bill /Smith/ Jr. Slashes around surnames are also used inPersonal Ancestral File.
A leading slash is one of several common conventions for indicating anactive-low digital signal, which performs the named function when at a low voltage level.[26] For example,dynamic random-access memory has active-low Chip Select, Row Address Strobe and Column Address Strobe signals, commonly written/CS,/RAS, and/CAS.[27] This extends to signals which select between two options, such as "R/W", which indicates that the function is "read" when high and "write" when low. (Sometimes written asR/W for greater clarity.[28]
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The slash (as the "shilling mark" or "solidus")[29] was an abbreviation for theshilling, a formercoin of the United Kingdom andits former colonies. Before thedecimalisation of currency in Britain, its currency abbreviations (collectively£sd) represented theirLatin names, derived from amedieval French modification of the lateRoman libra,solidus, anddenarius.[30] Thus, onepenny less than twopounds was written£1 19s 11d or£1 19ſ 11d. During the period whenEnglish orthography included thelong s,ſ orſ, (abbreviatingshilling) the ſ came to be written as a single slash.[31][32] The d. might be omitted, and "2ſ6" ("two shillings and sixpence") became simplified as 2/6.[29] Amounts in full pounds, shillings and pence could be written in many different ways, for example: £1 9s 6d, £1.9.6, £1-9-6, and even £1/9/6d (with a slash usedalso to separate pounds and shillings).[33] The same style was also used under theBritish Raj and early independent India for the predecimalizationrupee/anna/pie system.[34]
In five East African countries (Kenya,Tanzania,Uganda,Somalia, and thede facto country ofSomaliland), where the national currencies are denominated in shillings, thedecimal separator is a slash mark (e.g., 2/50). Where the minor unit is zero, anequals sign is used (e.g., 5/=).
Inforeign exchange, a slash is used to denote acurrency pair, for example the USD/EUR rate is the number ofeuros perUS dollar.
Slashes are a commoncalendar date separator[11] usedacross many countries and by some standards such as theCommon Log Format used by web servers. Depending on context, it may be in the form Day/Month/Year, Month/Day/Year, or Year/Month/Day. If only two elements are present, they typically denote a day and month in some order. For example,9/11 is a common American way of writing the date 11 September; Britons write this as 11/9. Owing to the ambiguity across cultures, the practice of using only two elements to denote a date is sometimes proscribed.[35]
Because of the world's many varyingconventional date and time formats,ISO 8601 advocates the use of a Year-Month-Day system separated by hyphens (e.g.,Victory in Europe Day occurred on 1945-05-08). In the ISO 8601 system, slashes represent date ranges: "1939/1945" represents what is more commonly written inAnglophone countries as "1939–1945". The autumn term of a northern-hemisphere school year might be marked "2010-09-01/12-22".
In English, a range marked by a slash often has a separate meaning from one marked by a dash or hyphen.[11] "24/25 December" would mark the time shared by both days (i.e., the night fromChristmas Eve toChristmas morning) rather than the time made up by both days together, which would be written "24–25 December". Similarly, a historical reference to "1066/67" might imply an event occurred during the winter of late 1066 and early 1067,[36] whereas a reference to 1066–67 would cover the entirety of both years. The usage was particularly common in British English duringWorld War II, where such slash dates were used fornight-bombingair raids. It is also used by some police forces in the United States.
The slash is used in numbering to note totals. For example, "page 17/35" indicates that the relevant passage is on the 17th page of a 35-page document. Similarly, the marking "#333/500" on a product indicates it is the 333rd out of 500 identical products or out of a batch of 500 such products. For scores on schoolwork, in games, and so on, "85/100" indicates 85 points were attained out of a possible 100.
Slashes are also sometimes used to mark ranges in numbers that already include hyphens or dashes. One example is theISO treatment of dating. Another is theUS Air Force's treatment of aircraft serial numbers, which are normally written to note the fiscal year and aircraft number. For example, "85-1000" notes the thousandth aircraft ordered in fiscal year 1985. To indicate the next fifty subsequent aircraft, a slash is used in place of a hyphen or dash: "85-1001/1050".
A pair of slashes (as "slants") are used in thetranscription ofspeech to enclosepronunciations (i.e.,phonetic transcriptions). For example, theIPA transcription of the English pronunciation of "solidus" is written/ˈsɒlɪdəs/.[6] Properly, slashes markbroad or phonemic transcriptions, whereas narrow,allophonic transcriptions are enclosed bysquare brackets. For example, the wordlittle may be broadly rendered as/ˈlɪtəl/ but a careful transcription of thevelarization of the second L would be written[ˈlɪɾɫ̩].
Insociolinguistics, a double or triple slash may also be used in the transcription of atraditional sociolinguistic interview or in other type of linguistic elicitation to represent simultaneous speech, interruptions, and certain types ofspeech disfluencies.
Single and double slashes are often used as typographic substitutes for theclick lettersǀ,ǁ.
Adiaphonemic transcription may be marked in several ways, e.g. with a pair of slash marks (⫽◌⫽).
The slash is used in variousscansion notations for representing the metrical pattern of a line of verse, typically to indicate a stressed syllable.[citation needed]
The slash (as a "virgule") offset by spaces to either side is used to markline breaks when transcribing text from a multi-line format into a single-line one.[11][37] It is particularly common in quotingpoetry,song lyrics, anddramatic scripts, formats where omitting the line breaks risks losing meaningful context. For example, here is a part ofHamlet'ssoliloquy:
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them...
If someone wanted to quote the above soliloquy in a prose paragraph, it is standard to mark the line breaks as follows: "To be, or not to be, that is thequestion: / Whether 'tis nobler in the mind tosuffer / The slings and arrows of outrageousFortune, / Or to take arms against a sea oftroubles, / And by opposing end them..." Less often, virgules are used in markingparagraph breaks when quoting aprose passage. Some style guides, such asNew Hart's, prefer to use a pipe| in place of the slash to mark these line and paragraph breaks.[11]
The virgule may be thinner than a standard slash when typeset. In computing contexts, it may be necessary to use anon-breaking space before the virgule to prevent it from beingwidowed on the next line.
The slash has become standard in several abbreviations. Generally, it is used to mark two-letterinitialisms such as A/C (short for "air conditioner"), w/o ("without"), b/w ("black and white" or, less often, "between"), w/e ("whatever" or, less often, "weekend" or "week ending"), i/o ("input/output"), r/w ("read/write"), and n/a ("not applicable"). Other initialisms employing the slash include w/ ("with") and w/r/t ("with regard to"). Such slashed abbreviations are somewhat more common in British English and were more common around theSecond World War (as with "S/E" to mean "single-engined"). The abbreviation 24/7 (denoting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week) describes a business that is always open or unceasing activity.[11]
The slash inderived units such as m/s (meters per second) is not an abbreviation slash, but a straight division. It is however in that position read as 'per' rather than e.g. 'over', which can be seen as analogous to units whose symbols are pure abbreviations such as mph (miles per hour), although in abbreviations 'per' is 'p' or dropped entirely (psi, pounds per square inch) rather than a slash.
In theUS government, the names of offices within various departments are abbreviated using slashes, starting with the larger office and following with its subdivisions. For example, theFederal Aviation Administration'sOffice of Commercial Space Transportation is formally abbreviated FAA/AST.
The slash or vertical bar (as a "separatrix") is used inproofreading to mark the end ofmargin notes[b] or to separate margin notes from one another. The slash is also sometimes used in various proofreadinginitialisms, such as l/c and u/c for changes tolower andupper case, respectively.
In formal business correspondence, when a letter is typed by someone other than the person responsible for its contents, it is standard to add a suffix with the initials of the author (in upper-case), and typist (in lower-case) after the signature block, separated by a slash. For example, a letter typed by D.E. at the direction of A.B.C. would include the line "ABC/de".[40]
The slash is used infan fiction to mark theromantic pairing a piece will focus upon (e.g., a K/S denoted aStar Trek story would focus on a sexual relationship betweenKirk andSpock), a usage which developed in the 1970s from the earlier friendship pairings marked byampersands (e.g., K&S). The genre as a whole is now known asslash fiction. Because it is more generally associated withhomosexual male relationships, lesbian slash fiction is sometimes distinguished asfemslash. In situations where other pairings occur, the genres may be distinguished as m/m, f/f, and so on.
The slash is used under theAnglo-American Cataloguing Rules to separate the title of a work from its statement of responsibility (i.e., the listing of its author, director, etc.). Like aline break, this slash is surrounded by a single space on either side. For example:
The format is used in bothcard catalogs and online records.
The slash is sometimes used as an abbreviation for building numbers. For example, in some contexts,[where?] 8/A Evergreen Gardens specifies Apartment 8 in Building A of the residential complex Evergreen Gardens. In the United States, however, such an address refers to the first division of Apartment 8 and is simply a variant of Apartment 8A or 8-A. Similarly in the United Kingdom, an address such as 12/2 Anywhere Road means flat (or apartment) 2 in the building numbered 12 on Anywhere Road.
The slash is also used in the United States in the postal abbreviation for "care of." For example, Judy Smith c/o Bob Smith could be used when Bob Smith is receiving mail on Judy's behalf. Typically, this would be used in a situation where someone is either out of town, in an institution or hotel, or temporarily staying at another's address.
In Spanish address writings, "c/" is used as the abbreviation of "calle" (or "carrer" in Catalan) meaning "street".
Slashes are used inmusical notation as an alternative to writing out specificnotes where it is easier to read than traditional notation or where the player canimprovise. They are commonly used to indicatechords either in place of or in combination with traditional notation, notably in the form ofslash chords. Fordrummers, they find use as an indication to continue with a previously indicated style.
A slash is used to mark aspare (knocking down all ten pins in two throws) when scoringten-pin andduckpin bowling.[41]
In online messaging, a slash might be used to imitate the formatting of a chat command (e.g., writing "/fliptable" as though there were such a command) or the closing tags of languages such as HTML (e.g., writing "/endrant" to end a diatribe or "/s" to mark the preceding text assarcastic). A pair of slashes is sometimes used as a way to markitalic text, where no special formatting is available (e.g., /italics/).[citation needed]
In legal writing, especially in a pleading, attorneys often sign their name with an "s" that is either enclosed by two slashes or followed by a single slash and preceding the attorney's name.[42] An example would be the following:
/s/ Bob Smith
Attorney for Plaintiff
TheIraqw language of Tanzania uses the slash as a letter, representing thevoiced pharyngeal fricative, as in/ameeni, "woman".[43]
There are usually no spaces either before or after a slash. According toNew Hart's Rules: The Oxford Style Guide, a slash is usually written without spacing on either side when it connects single words, letters or symbols.[11] Exceptions are inrepresenting the start of a new line when quoting verse, or a new paragraph when quoting prose.The Chicago Manual of Style also allows spaces when either of the separated items is a compound that itself includes a space: "Our New Zealand / Western Australia trip".[44] (Compareuse of an en dash used to separate such compounds.)The Canadian Style: A Guide to Writing and Editing prescribes: "No space before or after an oblique when used between individual words, letters or symbols; one space before and after the oblique when used between longer groups which contain internal spacing", giving the examples "n/a" and "Language and Society /Langue et société".[45]
According toThe Chicago Manual of Style, when typesetting a URL or computer path, line breaks should occur before a slash but not in the text between two slashes.[46]
As a very common character, the slash (as "slant") was originally encoded inASCII with the decimal code 47 or0x2F.[47] The same value was used inUnicode, which calls it "solidus" and also adds some more characters:
In XML and HTML, the slash can also be represented with thecharacter entity/ or thenumeric character reference/ or/ .[48]
| Name | Used for |
|---|---|
| diagonal | An uncommon name for the slash in all its uses,[3] |
| division slash | This is the Unicode Consortium's formal name for the variant of the slash used to markdivision.[49] (U+2215 ∕DIVISION SLASH) |
| forward slash | Aretronym used to distinguish slash from a backslash following the popularization of MS-DOS and other Microsoft operating systems, which use the backslash for paths in its file system.[9][10] Less oftenforward stroke (UK),foreslash,front slash, andfrontslash. It is possible even to see suchback-formations asreverse backslash.[50] |
| fraction slash | This is the Unicode Consortium's formal name for the low slash used to mark fractions.[49] (U+2044 ⁄FRACTION SLASH) Also sometimes known as thefraction bar, although this more commonly refers to the horizontal bar style, as in1/2. When used as a fraction bar, this form of the mark is less vertical than an ASCII slash, generally close to 45° andkerned on both sides;[51] this use is distinguished by Unicode as the fraction slash.[49] (This use is sometimes mistakenly described as thesole meaning of "solidus", with its use as a shilling mark and slash distinguished under the name "virgule".[51][52]) |
| oblique | A formerly common name for the slash in all its uses.[3] Alsooblique stroke,[53][54]oblique dash, etc. |
| scratch comma | A modern name for the virgule's historic use as a form of comma.[55] |
| separatrix | Originally, thevertical line separating integers from decimals before the advent of thedecimal point; later used for the vertical bar or slash used inproofreader's marginalia to denote the intended replacement for a letter or wordstruckthrough in proofed text[56] or to separate margin notes.[57] Sometimes misapplied to virgules. |
| shilling mark | A development of thelong Sſ used as an abbreviation for the (obsolete)British shilling (Latin:solidus),[5] and also for some modern-day currencies (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Somalia), where it sometimes takes the place of a decimal point. The 'slash' is known as a "shilling stroke".[21] |
| slant | From its shape, an infrequent name except (asslants) in its use to mark pronunciations off from other text[58] and as the originalASCII name of the character.[47] Alsoslant line(s) orbar(s).[9] |
| slash mark | An alternative name used to distinguish the punctuation mark from the word's other senses.[59] |
| slat | An uncommon name for the slash used by theesoteric programming languageINTERCAL.[54] Alsoslak.[54] |
| solidus | Another name for the mark (derived from the Latin form of 'shilling'), also applied to other slashes separating numbers or letters,[6] used in typography,[51] and adopted by theISO andUnicode[49][60] as their formal name for the ASCII slash ("slant"). (U+002F /SOLIDUS) The solidus's use as a division sign is distinguished as the division slash.[49] |
| stroke | A contraction of the phraseoblique stroke, used intelegraphy.[53] It is particularly employed in reading the mark out loud: "he stroke she" is a common British reading of "he/she". "Slash" has, however, become common in Britain in computing contexts, while some North Americanamateur radio enthusiasts employ the British "stroke". Less frequently, "stroke" is also used to refer to hyphens.[9] |
| virgule | A development ofvirgula ("twig"),[1] the original medieval Latin name of the character when it was used as a scratch comma and caesura mark.[1] Now primarily used as the name of the slash when it is used to mark line breaks in quotations.[citation needed] Sometimes mistakenly distinguished as a formal name for the slash, as against the solidus's supposed use as a fraction slash.[51][52] Formerly sometimesanglicized in British sources as thevirgil.[2] |
The slash may also be read out asand,or,and/or,to, orcum in some compounds separated by a slash;over orout of in fractions, division, andnumbering; andper ora(n) in derived units (as km/h) and prices (as $~/kg), where the division slash stands for "each".[9][61]
1. An English money of account, since the Norman Conquest of the value of 12 pence or1/20 of a pound sterling. Abbreviated s. (__ L.solidus: see SOLIDUS), formerly also sh., shil.; otherwise denoted by the sign /- after the numeral.
2. a sloping line used to separate shillings from pence. A shilling mark.
Putting a "/" in front of the pin name is the standard text way of writing it with a line over it. The "/" or line signifies that the pin is activated by a low voltage, or logic 0.
It brings the Read/Write (R/W) line low to indicate a write
sǒ·lidus, n. (pl. -di). (Hist.) gold coin introduced by Roman Emperor Constantine; (only in abbr.s.) shilling(s), as 7s. 6d., £1 1s.; the shilling line (for ſ or long s) as in 7/6. [LL use of LSOLIDus]
5also slash mark:DIAGONAL : 4
