January 2, 2021 ⁓ 3 min read
Every time I hear someone speak a URL and they say “forward slash,” I cringe. It is like nails on a chalkboard to me. Why? Well, because there is no character called “forward slash.”
There are two slash characters in common use that you will find on computer keyboards. They are:
- Slash (/)
- Backslash (\)
Who says that / is not forward slash?
The character sets say so.
Most any modern computer uses Unicode. Unicode is an attempt to include the character sets of every language on the planet — both past and present. It includes over 140,000 characters. We are only interested in two right now.
The character at code point 002F displays as / and is defined as “solidus.” Wait, what? Yes, that is the name for the divider line in a fraction. It sounds like something that would be an answer on Jeopardy. Unicode also gives an alternate name of “slash”. Aha! One point in my favor. The character at code point 005C displays as \ and is defined as “reverse solidus” or “backslash.”
Let’s continue. Unicode was not always the character set of choice on computers. It wasn’t all that long ago before Unicode that you were probably using ISO/IEC 8859-1 (at least for Western European Latin-based character sets). The character at code point 2F is defined as “solidus” and the one at 5C is “reverse solidus.” Hmm, no “forward slash” here, but no slashes at all. No point for anyone.
Let’s go way back to the early days of computers. ASCII was the character set of choice (unless you were on an IBM mainframe, then it was EBCDIC). I can find references defining ASCII from the early 60s, but they do not give the names of the characters. According to the Jargon File (a glossary of hacker terms), “slant” is the official name for the ASCII character with “slash” being the most common variant. So far, I have not been able to find a more authoritative source (but the Jargon File is well respected).
Moving outside of the world of computing, / was known as an “oblique stroke” in the 18th century, eventually shortened to “stroke.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “slash” as the name for this character first appeared in American English around 1961.
No one calls it “forward slash” except TV and radio presenters. Their reasoning for using this term is to make sure people do not confuse it with backslash since URLs use / as the separator and Windows path names use \ as the separator. (Having worked with computer novices, I know that you can say forward slash and backslash all you want but that doesn’t mean they have a clue whether you are referring to \ or / or most any other character on the keyboard.)
Here is the real punchline, though: browsers no longer care. Both of these work when typed into the location bar of the browser (computer code still requires the proper slashes):
- http://slashdot.org/
- http:\\slashdot.org\
Windows, too, has decided that either slash will do in path names. You can change directory to “c:\” or “c:/” without any problem.
Since it doesn’t matter so much, why even bother using the retronym “forward slash”? Just stop.