Slash (punctuation)

Slashes may be found in early writing as a variant form of dashes, vertical strokes, etc. The present use of a slash distinguished from such other marks derives from the medieval European virgule (, which was used as a full stop (also known as a period), scratch comma, and caesura mark. (The first sense was eventually lost to the low dot and the other two developed separately into the comma and caesura mark ) Its use as a comma became especially widespread in France, 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 the hyphen . The Fraktur script used throughout Central Europe in the early modern period used a single slash as a scratch comma and a double slash as a dash. The double slash developed into the double oblique hyphen and double hyphen before being usually simplified into various single dashes. In the 18th century, the mark was generally known in English as the "oblique". but particularly the less vertical fraction slash. 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 the shilling. The name "slash" is a recent development, not appearing in Webster's Dictionary until the Third Edition (1961) but has gained wide currency through its use in computing, a context where it is sometimes used in British English in preference to "stroke". Clarifying terms such as "forward slash" were coined because MS-DOS and Windows use the backslash extensively. ==Usage==

Disjunction and conjunction Connecting alternatives The slash is commonly used in many languages as a shorter substitute for the conjunction "or", typically with the sense of exclusive or (e.g., Y/N permits yes or no but not both). Its use in this sense is somewhat informal, although it is used in philology to note variants (e.g., virgula/) and etymologies (e.g., F. /LL. /L. /PIE. ). Less commonly, at sign is used instead: . Similarly, in German and some Scandinavian and Baltic languages, refers to any secretary and to an explicitly female secretary; some advocates of gender neutrality support forms such as for general use. This does not always work smoothly, however: problems arise in the case of words like ('doctor') where the explicitly female form is umlauted and words like ('Chinese person') where the explicitly female form loses the terminal -e. Although not as common as brackets, slashes can also be used for uncertain plurals such as "child/ren", "is/are", "book/s", "answer/s" or "fix/es". Connecting non-contrasting items The slash is also used as a shorter substitute for the conjunction "and" or inclusive or (i.e., A or B or both), In speech Sometimes the word slash is used in speech as a conjunction 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, 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), and "Gastornis slash Diatryma" for two supposed genera of prehistoric birds which are now thought to be one genus. Mathematics Fractions The slash is used between two numbers to indicate a fraction or ratio. Such formatting developed as a way to write the horizontal fraction bar on a single line of text. It is first attested in England and Mexico in the 18th century. This notation is known as an online, solidus, or shilling fraction. This notation can also be used when the concept of fractions is extended from numbers to arbitrary rings by the method of localization of a ring. Division The division slash is used between two numbers to indicate division. This use developed from the fraction slash in the late 18th or early 19th century. who wrote: :The occurrence of fractions, such as , , in the verbal part of mathematical works is a source of considerable loss of room, and creates an inelegant and even confused appearance in the printed page. It is very desirable, in every point of view, except the strictly mathematical one, that some method of representation should be adopted which does not require a larger space than is usual between two successive lines. At the same time, it is by no means of very great importance that the verbal part should entirely coincide with the mathematical part in notation, so long as the latter remains to preserve the usual conventions. The symbol ÷ has been disused for a sufficient reason, namely, the number of times which the pen must be taken off to form it. This has been, and we imagine always will be, the cause either of abandonment or abbreviation. The question is, whether a new and easy notation could not be substituted; and it is desirable that it should be derived from analogy, such as (accidentally, we believe) does exist in >, =, and === Slashes are a common calendar date separator Because of the world's many varying conventional 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 in Anglophone 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. whereas a reference to 1066–67 would cover the entirety of both years. The usage was particularly common in British English during World War II, where such slash dates were used for night-bombing air raids. It is also used by some police forces in the United States. Numbering 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 the ISO treatment of dating. Another is the US 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". Linguistic transcription A pair of slashes (as "slants") are used in the transcription of speech to enclose pronunciations (i.e., phonetic transcriptions). For example, the IPA transcription of the English pronunciation of "solidus" is written . It is particularly common in quoting poetry, song lyrics, and dramatic scripts, formats where omitting the line breaks risks losing meaningful context. For example, here is a part of Hamlet's soliloquy: 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 the Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to The slings and arrows of outrageous Or to take arms against a sea of And by opposing end them..." Less often, virgules are used in marking paragraph breaks when quoting a prose passage. Some style guides, such as ''New Hart's'', prefer to use a pipe in place of the slash to mark these line and paragraph breaks. Fiction The slash is used in fan fiction to mark the romantic pairing a piece will focus upon (e.g., a K/S denoted a Star Trek story would focus on a sexual relationship between Kirk and Spock), a usage which developed in the 1970s from the earlier friendship pairings marked by ampersands (e.g., K&S). The genre as a whole is now known as slash fiction. Because it is more generally associated with homosexual male relationships, lesbian slash fiction is sometimes distinguished as femslash. In situations where other pairings occur, the genres may be distinguished as m/m, f/f, and so on. Libraries The slash is used under the Anglo-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 a line break, this slash is surrounded by a single space on either side. For example: • Gone with the Wind / by Margaret Mitchell. • Star Trek II. The Wrath of Khan [videorecording] / Paramount Pictures. The format is used in both card catalogs and online records. Addresses The slash is sometimes used as an abbreviation for building numbers. For example, in some contexts, 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". Music Slashes are used in musical notation as an alternative to writing out specific notes where it is easier to read than traditional notation or where the player can improvise. They are commonly used to indicate chords either in place of or in combination with traditional notation, notably in the form of slash chords. For drummers, they find use as an indication to continue with a previously indicated style. Sports A slash is used to mark a spare (knocking down all ten pins in two throws) when scoring ten-pin and duckpin bowling. Text messaging 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 as sarcastic). A pair of slashes is sometimes used as a way to mark italic text, where no special formatting is available (e.g., /italics/). Before an e-signature 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. An example would be the following: As a letter The Iraqw language of Tanzania uses the slash as a letter, representing the voiced pharyngeal fricative, as in /ameeni, "woman". ==Spacing==

There are usually no spaces either before or after a slash. According to ''New 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. (Compare use 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''". According to The 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. == Unicode ==

that is prohibited in Windows file and folder names, the big solidus is permitted (first box above). In this context, it is very similar to the slash (second box).|class=skin-invert-image As a very common character, the slash (as "slant") was originally encoded in ASCII with the decimal code 47 or 0x2F. • (for strikethrough) • (for strikethrough) • • • • • (fullwidth version of solidus) • Unicode fraction slash is supposed to reformat the preceding and succeeding digits as numerator and denominator glyphs (e.g., display of "1, , 2" as , and similarly "123, , 456" as ). This is supported by an increasing number of environments and computer fonts. Because support is not yet universal (this browser, for instance, renders "123⁄456"), some authors still use Unicode 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 of / for 2 ≤ n ≤ 6 and n = 8 (e.g. and , as well as , , and , are found in the Unicode Number Forms or Latin-1 Supplement blocks. ==Alternative names==

The slash may also be read out as and, or, and/or, to, or cum in some compounds separated by a slash; over or out of in fractions, division, and numbering; and per or a(n) in derived units (as km/h) and prices (as $~/kg), where the division slash stands for "each". ==See also==