The slash is a slanting line punctuation mark, /. It is also known as a stroke or solidus, a forward slash and several other historical or technical names. 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, in between multiple alternative or related terms, and to indicate abbreviation.
History
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 (Latin: virgula, lit. "twig"), which was used as a full stop (also known as a period), scratch comma, and caesura mark. These historical usages were lost over time, with its role as a full stop eventually being lost to the low dot (.), and the other two usages developing separately into distinct marks, the comma (,) and the 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/uirgula) and etymologies (e.g., F. virgule/LL. virgula/L. virga/PIE. *wirgā). Such slashes may be used to avoid taking a position in naming disputes. 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. In the case of English, this is usually restricted to degendered pronouns such as "he/she" or "s/he". Most other Indo-European languages include more far-reaching use of grammatical gender. In these, the separate gendered desinences (grammatical suffices) of the words may be given divided by slashes or set off with parentheses. For example, in Spanish, hijo is a son and a hija is a daughter; some proponents of gender-neutral language advocate the use of hijo/a, hijo(a) or hija/hijo when writing for a general audience or addressing a listener of unknown gender. Less commonly, at sign ⟨@⟩ is used instead: hij@. Similarly, in German and some Scandinavian and Baltic languages, Sekretär refers to any secretary and Sekretärin to an explicitly female secretary; some advocates of gender neutrality support forms such as Sekretär/-in for general use. 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. 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), typically in situations where it fills the role of a hyphen or en dash. For example, the "Hemingway/Faulkner generation" might be used to discuss the era of the Lost Generation inclusive of the people around and affected by both Hemingway and Faulkner. This use is sometimes proscribed, as by New Hart's Rules, the style guide for the Oxford University Press.
Presenting routes The slash, as a form of inclusive or, is also used to punctuate the stages of a route (e.g., Shanghai/Nanjing/Wuhan/Chongqing as stops on a tour of the Yangtze).
Introducing topic shifts The word slash is also developing as a way to introduce topic shifts or follow-up statements. Slash can introduce a follow-up statement, such as, "I really love that hot dog place on Liberty Street. Slash can we go there tomorrow?" It can also indicate a shift to an unrelated topic, as in "JUST SAW ALEX! Slash I just chubbed on oatmeal raisin cookies at north quad and i miss you." The new usage of "slash" appears most frequently in spoken conversation, though it can also appear in writing.
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
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