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A solidus, oblique or slash, /, is a punctuation mark. It is also called a diagonal, separatrix, shilling mark, stroke, virgule, slant, or forward slash.
UsageHistoryThis symbol goes back to the days of ancient Rome. In the early modern period, in the Fraktur script, which was widespread through Europe in the Middle Ages, one slash (/) represented a comma, while two slashes (//) represented a Dash. The two slashes eventually evolved into a sign similar to the Equals sign (=), then being further simplified to a single dash (-). EnglishThe most common use is to replace the hyphen to make clear a strong joint between words or phrases, such as "the Ernest Hemingway/William Faulkner generation". Yet very often it is used to represent the concept or, especially in instruction books. The symbol also appears in the phrase and/or, a prose representation of the logical concept of inclusive or. The State Legislature of Georgia, however, has banned this usage as cumbersome. The slash is often used (incorrectly) to separate the letters in a two-letter initialism, such as R/C (short for radio control) or even w/e (an internet slang abbreviation for whatever). Purists strongly discourage this misuse of the symbol, however, because it could potentially create confusion about its meaning. The virgule is also used to indicate a line break when quoting multiple lines from a poem, play, or headline. For a specialized use of the slash in the titles of fan fiction stories, see slash fiction. Note that the solidus and virgule are distinctly different typographic symbols with decidedly different uses. The solidus is significantly more oblique than the virgule. The character found on standard keyboards is the virgule and while most people lump the two characters together, (and when there is no alternative it is acceptable to use the virgule in place of the solidus,) they are different. The solidus is used in the display of ratios and fractions as in constructing a fraction using superscript and subscript as in “123⁄456”; the virgule is used for essentially any other textual purpose. LinguisticsSlashes are used to enclose a phonemic transcription of speech. ArithmeticA solidus is used to separate the numerator and denominator in a vulgar fraction, or as a division operator in general.
Note that the special character Fraction slash U+2044, character ⁄ (the solidus or shilling mark proper), can be used instead of a virgule, and is preferred whenever possible. It is also found in many legacy Apple Macintosh character sets. Systems capable of fine typography should display the result as a true fraction with smaller numbers. Unicode also distinguishes the Division Slash U+2215 (∕) which may be more oblique than the normal solidus character. ComputingFilesOn Unix-like systems, the slash carries two distinct meanings. Its primary use, as with URLs, is to separate directory and file components of a path:
A leading slash however represents the root directory of the Virtual file system; it is used when specifying absolute paths:
It is sometimes called a "forward slash" to contrast with the backslash \, which is the path delimiter on MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows systems. These operating systems use the backslash rather than the slash because in the early days of CP/M—before directories were supported —the slash was chosen as the command-line option indicator:
Note however that the "forward slash" will be translated into a backslash by most versions of DOS and Windows, in contexts where there is little ambiguity with command-line options. Some people often sloppily and incorrectly refer to a slash as a "backslash", for instance when reading URLs out loud. ChatMany Internet Relay Chat and in-game chat clients use the slash to distinguish commands, such as the ability to join or part a chat room or send a private message to a certain user.
ProgrammingIn computer programming, the solidus corresponds to Unicode and ASCII character 47, or 0x002F. It is used in the following settings:
DatesCertain shorthand date formats use / as a delimiter, for example "9/16/2003" (in United States usage) or "16/9/2003" (in many other countries) means September 16, 2003. In Britain there was a specialized use in prose: 7/8 May referred to the night which starts the evening of 7 May and ends the morning of 8 May, totalling about 12 hours depending on the season. This was used to list night-bombing air-raids which would carry past midnight. Some police units in the US use this notation for night disturbances or chases. Contrariwise, the form with a hyphen, 7-8 May, would refer to the two-day period, at most 49 hours. This would commonly be used for meetings. The International Standard ISO 8601, in attempting to resolve this ambiguity, introduced problems of its own. According to this norm, dates must be written year-month-day using hyphens, but time periods are written as two standard dates separated by a slash: 1939-09-01/1945-05-08, for example, would be the duration of the Second World War in the European theatre, while 09-03/12-22 might be used for a fall term of a Western school, from September third to December twenty-second. British moneyBefore decimalisation in the UK, / was used to separate pounds, shillings, and pence values. Notice how the dash is used to represent zero.
Alternative namesIn the UK, the usual term for the mark is an oblique, although slash is gaining currency with increasing use of computers and also through the media, such as BBC Radio. Sometimes this is called stroke (and oblique stroke) , although that may be confused with the hyphen. Stroke is most commonly used among the North American amateur radio community. Among American telephone technical support representatives in the computer industry, the double-slash in a URL address is commonly nicknamed "whack-whack." For example, the representative may tell the user to go to a support website: "OK, open up a browser and type in the following address: http: whack-whack, www dot supportsite dot com." The origins of this slang term are not known but may be related to the slang for the exclamation point (!) which support engineers, especially in password resets, often refer to as "bang." —C.J. Newton What does Slash (punctuation) mean ? Search with Google !Article on Slash (punctuation), category, different spelling or sense |
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