The Slash (punctuation) reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Jul-2004
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Slash (punctuation)

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Punctuation marks
apostrophe ( ' )
parentheses ( ( ) ),
brackets ( [ ] ); ( { } ); ( < > )
colon ( : )
comma ( , )
dash ( ‒ ); ( – ); ( — ); ( ― )
ellipsis ( ... )
exclamation mark ( ! ); ( ¡ ! )
full stop/period ( . )
hyphen ( - ); ( ‐ )
interrobang ( ‽ )
question mark ( ? ); ( ¿ ? )
quotation marks ( ‘ ’ ); ( “ ” );
    ( ‹ › ); ( « » ); ( ‚ ‘ ); ( „ “ );
    ( „ ” ); ( 「 」 ); ( 『 』 )
semicolon ( ; )
slash ( / ) and backslash ( \\ )
space (   ) and interpunct ( · )
vertical bar / pipe ( | )
asterisk ( * ) and dagger ( † ‡ )

''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.

Table of contents
1 Usage:

Usage:

English

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.

Arithmetic

A virgule 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 ⁄ (the solidus or shilling mark proper), can be used instead of a virgule, 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.

Computing

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 .

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 poundss, 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.