Slash (punctuation)

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.