Slash (punctuation)

Once used as the equivalent of the modern period and comma, the slash is now used to represent division and fractions, as a date separator, or to connect alternative terms.

The present use of a slash distinguished from such other marks derives from the medieval European virgule (Latin: virgula, lit.

[5][6] The name "slash" is a recent development, not appearing in Webster's Dictionary until the Third Edition (1961)[7][a] 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" have been coined owing to widespread use of Microsoft's DOS and Windows operating systems, which use the backslash extensively.

One example is the Assyrian naming dispute, which prompted the US and Swedish 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 more gender-neutral language in place of the traditional masculine or plural gender neutrals.

This does not always work smoothly, however: problems arise in the case of words like Arzt ('doctor') where the explicitly female form Ärztin is umlauted and words like Chinese ('Chinese person') where the explicitly female form Chinesin loses the terminal -e. The slash is also used as a shorter substitute for the conjunction "and" or inclusive or (i.e., A or B or both),[12] typically in situations where it fills the role of a hyphen or en dash.

(said by a beekeeper examining in a beehive),[18] and "Gastornis slash Diatryma" for two supposed genera of prehistoric birds which are now thought to be one genus.

Because support is not yet universal, 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 1/n for 2 ≤ n ≤ 6 and n = 8 (e.g. ⅔ and ⅝, as well as ⅐, ⅑, and ⅒, are found in the Unicode Number Forms or Latin-1 Supplement blocks.

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 and Microsoft Windows systems.

Comments that begin with /* (a slash and an asterisk) and end with */ were introduced in PL/I and subsequently adopted by SAS, C, Rexx, C++, Java, JavaScript, PHP, CSS, and C#.

A double slash // is also used by C99, C++, C#, PHP, Java, Swift, Pascal and JavaScript to start a single line comment.

In a style originating in the Digital Equipment Corporation line of operating systems (OS/8, RT-11, TOPS-10, et cetera), Windows, DOS, some CP/M programs, OpenVMS, and OS/2 all use the slash to indicate command-line options.

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.

The Gedcom standard for exchanging computerized genealogical data uses slashes to delimit surnames; an example would be Bill /Smith/ Jr.

A leading slash is one of several common conventions for indicating an active-low digital signal, which performs the named function when at a low voltage level.

In foreign exchange, a slash is used to denote a currency pair, for example the USD/EUR rate is the number of euros per US dollar.

[35] 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).

The usage was particularly common in British English during World War II, where such slash dates were used for night-bombing air raids.

The slash is used in various scansion 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 mark line breaks when transcribing text from a multi-line format into a single-line one.

[11][37] 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: 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... [full citation needed] 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 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..." 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.

Generally, it is used to mark two-letter initialisms 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").

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.

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.).

[42] An example would be the following: /s/ Bob Smith Attorney for PlaintiffThe Iraqw language of Tanzania uses the slash as a letter, representing the voiced pharyngeal fricative, as in /ameeni, "woman".

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.