Slash (/)

How to read it

Unicode encodes it as U+002F SOLIDUS, with slash, forward slash and virgule as its other names. The American Heritage Dictionary lists four uses: separating alternatives, as in and/or; standing for per, as in miles/hour; dividing the parts of a web address; and marking the ends of verse lines printed continuously (Old King Cole / Was a merry old soul). The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary gives oblique as the British English name and adds fractions. Cambridge Dictionary notes slashes in dates (1/8/1985), where British English puts the day first and American English the month, and in paired dates in academic references (1995/1997). Both dictionaries record a newer use of “slash” as a word between two roles, as in actor-slash-director (American Heritage) or lawyer-slash-manager (Oxford). The Backslash (\) (\) leans the other way.

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Slash or “or”?

Chicago and the UK government disagree. The Chicago Manual of Style’s Q&A says that for most alternatives “the slash is best”, and that on/off means either on or off. GOV.UK’s style guide says, “Do not use slashes instead of ‘or’,” and writes “Do this 3 or 4 times”.

Look-alikes

The Backslash (\) \ leans the other way and is a computer character. Unicode has two slashes for maths: the fraction slash ⁄ (U+2044), “for composing arbitrary fractions” and the one typographers call the solidus, and the division slash ∕ (U+2215), a “generic division operator”. It also lists the mathematical rising diagonal ⟋ (U+27CB) and the big solidus ⧸ (U+29F8).