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- 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:
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.
A solidus 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
⁄, can be used instead of a solidus, 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.
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 pounds, shillings, and pence values.
- 2/6 – two shillings and six pence
- 10/- – ten shillings
- £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.
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