Solidus
This article concerns punctuation. For the coin see Solidus (coin).
A solidus or slash, /, is a punctuation mark. It is also called a diagonal, separatrix, shilling mark, stroke, or virgule.
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
Usually called a slash or sometimes, unnecessarily, a forward slash, / is used to separate directory or names in Unix file paths and in URLs.
- www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidus_%28punctuation%29
This is in contrast to the backslash \ which is path delimiter on Microsoft Windows systems. Windows uses the backslash rather than the slash because in the early days of MS-DOS -- before directories were supported! -- the slash was chosen as the command-line option indicator:
- dir /w /ogn c:\windows\
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 computer programming, the solidus corresponds to Unicode and ASCII character 47, or 0x002F.
Referenced By
ASCII | ASCIIZ | ASCII code | ASCIIbetical | American Standard Code for Information Interchange | Solidus (coin) | US-ASCII | Unicode 1-100 | Unicode 1-50
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