The slash (/) is a sign used as a punctuation mark and for various other purposes. It is often called a forward slash, a retronym used to distinguish it from the backslash (\). It has many other names. The slash goes back to the days of ancient Rome. In the early modern period, in the Fraktur script, which was widespread through Europe in the Middle Ages, one slash (/) represented a comma, while two slashes (//) represented a dash. The two slashes eventually evolved into a sign similar to the equals sign (=), then being further simplified to a single dash (–). The slash is most commonly used as the word substitute for "or" which indicates a choice (often mutually-exclusive) is present. (Examples: Male/Female, Y/N, He/She. See also the Gender-neutrality in Spanish and Portuguese section below.) The slash is also used to avoid taking a position in a naming controversy, allowing the juxtaposition of both names without stating a preference. An example is the designation "Assyrian/Chaldean/Syriac" in the official U.S. census, reflecting the Syriac naming dispute. The Swedish census has come to a similar solution, using "Assyrier/Syrianer" to refer to the same ethnic group. Another use of the slash is to replace the hyphen or en dash to make a clear, strong joint between words or phrases, such as "the Hemingway/Faulkner generation". The slash is also used to indicate a line break when quoting multiple lines from a poem, play, or headline; or in an ordinary prose quotation, the start of a new paragraph. In this case, a space is placed before and after the slash. For example: "Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks / But bears it out even to the edge of doom". When used this way, the mark is called a virgule. It is thinner than a solidus if typeset. There are usually no spaces either before or after a slash: "male/female". Exceptions are in representing the start of a new line when quoting verse, or a new paragraph when quoting prose. The Chicago Manual of Style (at 6.104) also allows spaces when either of the separated items is a compound that itself includes a space: "Our New Zealand / Western Australia trip". (Compare use of an en dash used to separate such compounds.) The Canadian Style: A Guide to Writing and Editing prescribes "No space before or after an oblique when used between individual words, letters or symbols; one space before and after the oblique when used between longer groups which contain internal spacing", giving the examples "n/a" and "Language and Society / Langue et société". Multiple forward slashes in succession are used as emoji by Japanese internet users to convey shyness or embarrassment, often placed at the end of a statement. The slash is often used to separate the letters in a two-letter initialism such as R/C (short for "radio control") or w/o ("without"). Other examples include b/w ("between" or, sometimes, "black and white"), w/e ("whatever", also "weekend" or "week ending"), i/o ("input/output"), r/w ("read/write") and even a one-letter initialism w/ ("with"). British English in particular makes use of the slash instead of the hyphen in forming abbreviations. Many examples are found in writings during the Second World War. For example, "S/E" means "single-engined", as a quick way of writing a type of aircraft. In the U.S. government, office names are abbreviated using slashes, starting with the larger office and following with its subdivisions. In the State Department, the Office of Commercial & Business Affairs in the Bureau for Economic, Energy and Business Affairs is referred to as EEB/CBA. When highlighting corrections on a proof, a proofreader will write what he or she thinks should be changed—or why it should be changed—in the margin. They separate the comments with a slash called a separatrix. When marking an uppercase letter for conversion to lowercase, a proofreader will put a slash through it and write lc or l/c in the margin. Used between numbers slash means division, and in this sense the symbol may be read aloud as "over". For sets, it usually means modulo (quotient group). Proper typography requires a more horizontal line and the numbers rendered using superscript and subscript, e.g. “123⁄456”. Currency exchange rate notation uses slash in this manner, for example the exchange rate for the euro in U.S. dollars is quoted as "EUR/USD x", which means the value of a euro divided by the value of a U.S. dollar is x. The solidus or a shilling mark is a punctuation mark used to separate base units of currency and subunits. The solidus is significantly more horizontal than the slash.[2] Before the decimalisation of currency in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth of Nations, currency sums in pounds, shillings, and pence were abbreviated using the '£' symbol, the "s." symbol, and the "d." symbol (collectively £sd) referring to the Roman Libra, solidus, and denarius.[3] The 's.' was at one stage written using a long s, ſ, that was further abbreviated to the ∕ symbol,[4][5] and the "d." was suppressed.[3] Thus, £1∕19∕11d meant "one pound, nineteen shillings and eleven pence", "2∕6" meant "two shillings and six pence",[3] and "5∕-" meant "five shillings". This usage led to the names solidus and shilling mark for this character.[6] The format was then adopted to denote amounts in other currencies, such as those in the pre-decimalisation Indian rupee-anna-pie currency system.[7] In decimalised currency, a solidus followed by a dash is used at the conclusion of the currency amount if subunits are not included. For example, on a hand-written invoice, one may write "$50∕-" (equivalent to $50.00) to denote the end of the currency amount. This keeps anybody from adding further digits to the end of the number. A slash denotes a spare, knocking down all ten pins in two throws, when scoring ten-pin bowling, and duckpin bowling.[citation needed] In Unicode and ASCII, the slash is encoded as U+002F / solidus (47decimal, HTML: / aliases: slash, virgule).[8] In contradiction to the precedent of long-established typesetting terminology (see Currency),[2] the ISO and the Unicode Consortium both name this character "SOLIDUS".[9] Despite amendments to the character metadata (by including aliases, such as "solidus (in typography)" for FRACTION SLASH[10]), This contradiction is likely to persist, as The Unicode Consortium clearly states: “[…] once a character is encoded, its name will not be changed.”[11] Usually the character considered a true solidus is U+2044 ⁄ fraction slash.[12] Unicode standards also intend this character to specifically indicate a fraction, and to flag the rendering engine to realize the numbers as vulgar fractions if possible; for example, so that "1⁄2" can be rendered similar to the single character "½".[13] In addition there is U+2215 ∕ division slash[14] which does not have this typographical effect. Since few fonts and text layout systems have the proper mappings to implement this, FRACTION SLASH is often realized identical to DIVISION SLASH. The fraction slash is found in the Mac-Roman character set used on legacy Apple Macintosh computers. It can be typed on a Macintosh computer (with US keyboard layout) by pressing: ⌥ Option+⇧ Shift+1 (this produces the Unicode FRACTION SLASH on Mac OS X). The fraction slash can be typed on Microsoft Windows as Alt+8260 and the division slash as Alt+8725. On Unix-like systems the slash is the path component separator and also the volume root directory: pictures/image.jpg /usr/john/pictures The slash is sometimes called a "forward slash" to contrast with the backslash, "\", which is also used for the same purpose in DOS, Windows and OS/2 systems. Due to DOS and Windows users often seeing far more backslashes than normal ones, they sometimes incorrectly assume a backslash is normal and thus incorrectly call a slash a "backslash",[15] or felt they needed to say "forward slash" to ensure the correct one was understood. With the increased visibility of slash in Internet URLs and increased use of Unix systems (such as OS X and Linux), slashes have again become more common for most computer users.