Slash (punctuation)

The slash is the oblique slanting line punctuation mark . Also known as a stroke, a solidus, a forward slash or several other historical or technical names including oblique and virgule. Once used to mark periods and commas, the slash is now used to represent division and fractions, exclusive 'or' and inclusive 'or', and as a date separator. A slash in the reverse direction is known as a backslash. 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 (virgula, (). "twig"), which was used 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 or before being usually simplified into various single dashes. In the 18th century, the mark was generally known in English as the "oblique". 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".