Slash (punctuation)
- ''This article concerns punctuation. For other meanings of the word slash see slash.
A
solidus,
oblique or
slash,
/, is a
punctuation mark. It is also called a
diagonal,
separatrix,
shilling mark,
stroke,
virgule, or
slant.
Usage:
English
The 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".
For a specialized use of the slash in the titles of fan fiction stories, see slash fiction.
Arithmetic
A virgule is used to separate the numerator and denominator in a vulgar fraction, or as a division operator in general.
- 3/8 – three eighths
- x = a / b – x equals a divided by b
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.
Computing
The slash is used to separate directory or names in Unix file paths and in
URLs.
- www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_%28punctuation%29
It is sometimes called a "forward slash" to contrast with the
backslash \\ which is the path delimiter on
MS-DOS and
Microsoft Windows systems. Windows uses the backslash rather than the slash because in the early days of
DOS — before directories were supported — the slash was chosen as the command-line option indicator:
- dir /w /ogn c:\\windows\\
In
computer programming, the
solidus corresponds to
Unicode and
ASCII character 47, or
0x002F.
Wikipedia
The slash is also used in Wikipedia for sub-pages. For example: Wikipedia:Requested_articles/science or User:anyuser/stuff.
Dates
Certain shorthand date formats use / as a delimiter, for example 9/16/2003 means September 16,
2003.
Other
Before decimalisation in the UK,
/ was used to separate
poundss, shillings, and
pence values.
- 2/6 – two shillings and six pence\n: 10/- – ten shillings\n: £1/19/11 – one pound, nineteen shillings, and eleven pence
In the UK, the usual term for the mark is an
oblique, although
slash is gaining currency with increasing use of computers.
\n\n
