( proscribed ) exclusive or ( used to link mutually-exclusive alternatives ) I think she /he writes very well.( sometimes proscribed ) inclusive or ( used to link compatible alternatives or joint items ) He's an actor /model./ / ( used to italicize text in the absence of italic formatting )./ / ( used to mark broad phonemic transcriptions ).In some cases, it is replaced by a term, such as “even” for currency or “out of” for totals. In most uses such as to indicate date separations and line breaks, the mark is not mentioned when the text is read aloud.For translations and less common English names, see slash. (Some typographers mistaken label this mark as the virgule and distinguish the solidus as the fraction slash ⟨⁄⟩, but neither historical nor present official use supports such a distinction.) The mark is now generally known by the American term slash or forward slash, although still frequently known as a stroke in British English.
It is now defined by Unicode and ISO as the solidus, a late-19th-century British term for the shilling mark. The mark was originally known as the virgula or virgule in its medieval use as a form of period or comma.