A solidus or slash, /, is a punctuation mark. It is also called a diagonal, separatrix, shilling mark, stroke, or virgule.
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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 in to separate numerator and denominator in a vulgar fraction or as a division operator in general.
Usually called a slash or sometimes, unnecessarily, a forward slash, / is used to separate directory or names in Unix file paths and in URLs.
Before decimalisation in the UK, / was used to separate pounds, shillings, and pence values.
Usage:
English
Arithmetic
Computing
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:Other
In computer programming, the solidus corresponds to Unicode and ASCII character 47, or 0x002F.
A solidus\ is a gold coin issued by the Romans beginning in the 4th century AD through the Byzantine Empire until the 10th century AD. Later coins are also known by this name.
