10 other ways to use /

The man who created the world wide web says the two oblique strokes in front of every website address are a bit of a mistake. How else is / used?

If Sir Tim Berners-Lee had his time again he’d probably leave // out.

The two forward slashes at the start of URLs are pretty pointless, says the British scientist who is credited with being the architect of the world wide web.

Typing in // has just resulted in people overusing their index fingers, wasting time and using more paper, he has told a technology meeting in Washington.

But their inclusion has made the forward slash an everyday part of people’s lives globally. Other than in website addresses, here are 10 ways / is used.

1. In tenpin bowling it is used in scoring to show a spare. This is when all of the pins have been knocked down after the second ball of a frame.

2. In Teelineshorthand, it is used instead of a full stop. And in Fraktur script, which dates back to the Middle Ages, a forward slash represents a comma.

3. In old money it is used to divide shillings and pence. So something that cost ten shillings and six pence could be written as 10/6.

4. / is the title of a novel by author Greg Bear. Published in 1997, it is also known as Slant.

5. When writing dates it is used as a delimiter. This is character or sequence of characters marking the beginning or end of a unit of data. So today’s date would be written as 14/10/09.

6. In poems and plays it is used to indicate a line break when quoting multiple lines. For example “I had a dream, which was not all a dream/The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars”, from Lord Byron’s poem Darkness.

7. In NetHack, a 1987 video game, a forward slash is the symbol for a wand.

8. US government department names can be abbreviated using it. For example the Department of Defense, International Security Affairs is DOD/ISA.

9. It often replaces a hyphen to make clear a strong joint between words or phrases eg: Beyonce is a singer/actress.

10. But it can also represent “or” in instruction manuals and books.