Or symbol (∨)

How to read it

This is the inclusive or. OpenStax’s Contemporary Mathematics says a disjunction is true if at least one of its parts is true, and puts it in a phrase: “Inclusive or means you can have one, or the other, or both!” Oscar Levin’s Discrete Mathematics says the same of P ∨ Q, which is false only when P and Q are both false. Everyday English often means the other kind. forall x: Calgary gives the restaurant menu’s “Entrees come with either soup or salad” as an exclusive or, where you can’t have both without paying extra; the logic symbol ∨ never means that. Unicode names the character LOGICAL OR (U+2228), also called vee and disjunction.

Also searched as: ∨, disjunction symbol, logical or, or symbol in logic, vee symbol, v symbol in logic.

Other ways of writing “or”

forall x: Calgary notes that books in the algebraic tradition write disjunction as addition, +, and that many programming languages use a vertical bar, | or ||. The exclusive or has no sign of its own in most logic books; in electronics it is the XOR gate.

Look-alikes

∨ is the ∧ symbol turned upside down: ∨ is “or”, ∧ is “and”. It is easy to read as the letter v. Unicode cross-refers it to the down arrowhead ⌄ (U+2304) and to the large n-ary logical or ⋁ (U+22C1), which joins a whole list of statements.