Solidus
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I was curious about the Unicode characters involved in the "shrug" text art:
̄\_(ツ)_/ ̄
so I ran it through charnames.pl:
̄\_(ツ)_/ ̄ | | 0x0020 "SPACE" |̄| 0x0304 "COMBINING MACRON" |\| 0x005C "REVERSE SOLIDUS" |_| 0x005F "LOW LINE" |(| 0x0028 "LEFT PARENTHESIS" |ツ| 0x30C4 "KATAKANA LETTER TU" |)| 0x0029 "RIGHT PARENTHESIS" |_| 0x005F "LOW LINE" |/| 0x002F "SOLIDUS" | | 0x0020 "SPACE" |̄| 0x0304 "COMBINING MACRON"
…and that led me to wonder why the official Unicode names for slash and backslash are "solidus" and "reverse solidus". Wiktionary explains the convoluted history — I'll leave it to you to decode the tangle…
Dick Margulis said,
August 11, 2026 @ 11:01 am
In type composition, the solidus is the ordinary keyboard slash. But Unicode provides two similar characters with a different pitch angle, the fraction slash U+2044 ( ⁄ ) and the division slash U+2215, which is not implemented in the browser interface where I'm typing. The fraction slash has negative side bearings. I typed a space between each paren and the fraction slash above. Without that space, it looks like this: (⁄). Case fractions (standard fractions included in the type case, historically), such as ¼½¾⅓⅔⅕, have a superior figure and an inferior figure kerned into the slash. By use of the fraction slash with superior and inferior characters, the compositor can build a piece fraction, that is, a fraction composed of type pieces, that matches the case fractions, such as ⁹⁄₁₇. Superior and inferior letters can be used as well, for algebraic expressions. I've never been able to see a visual difference between the fraction slash and the division slash, so I'm not sure what the latter is intended for nor surprised that it's not available in the browser.
Dick Margulis said,
August 11, 2026 @ 11:04 am
Well, THAT didn't work. The browser doesn't implement the fraction slash well at all. If you want to see what that was SUPPOSED to look like, pop up your favorite Unicode app (I use Character Map in Windows), search for fraction slash, and build your own examples.
John From Cincinnati said,
August 11, 2026 @ 1:38 pm
@Dick Margulis: Thank you for some most illuminating Unicode facts involving case fractions and piece fractions. I followed your suggestion and experimented with the two slashes, in four different fonts: Times New Roman, Courier New, Arial, and Lucida Sans Unicode. Only in the Unicode font did the two slashes behave differently from one another, both in their pitch and in their kerning. The fraction slash is steeper, and it reduces its distance from whatever is to its left and to its right.
I don't know for sure if LLog allows the style attribute on blockquote, but I will try it below:
If you don't see any differences, then Oh well.
Philip Taylor said,
August 11, 2026 @ 1:46 pm
Ah yes, I see ⁹⁄₁₇ (whilst rendering fine in the compose window) is far more widely spaced in the thread window than it is in (e.g.,) TeXworks.
John From Cincinnati said,
August 11, 2026 @ 1:56 pm
That went pretty well but was not entirely what I intended. The first fraction on each line was a five, one of the slashes, and a seven. The second was a superscript five, a slash, and a subscript seven. Locally for me the first and second fractions are different on each line, but in LLog the fraction slash forces superscript and subscript, while the division slash forces same line. The line labelled Alternating was intended to display the two different pitches, but in LLog it didn't.
Yves Rehbein said,
August 11, 2026 @ 3:17 pm
The way to type SOLIDUS on a QWERTZ keyboard differs from QWERTY in a way that reminds me of xkcd 3284 vis-a-vis conversion.
It took a while for me to figure out that "don;t" is a simple typo. Some signs that are standard in programming probably wouldn't have been chosen weren't it for the QWERTY layout, notably the curly brackets and the slashes. SHIFT + 7 ("/") is quite acceptable, even logical, and necessary because ä, ö, ü are separate signs, but ALTGR keyshift combinations for {} are bad enough I switch to QWERTY on occasion.
David Marjanović said,
August 12, 2026 @ 2:33 pm
It worked beautifully in my rather ancient browser. I'll try some more: ¹⁄ ₁₁₈₆!
Good luck finding any blog software that does.
Surprises me. QWERTZ here; { is AltGr+7, } is AltGr+0. Right thumb on AltGr, right middle finger on 7 or 0…
David Marjanović said,
August 12, 2026 @ 2:35 pm
Oops. I accidentally put a space in ¹⁄₁₁₈₆.
Neil said,
August 13, 2026 @ 3:35 am
When I started working at a UK-based scientific publisher 20+years ago in the mid-noughties, lots of the people training me in copy-editing and proofing called it a 'solidus'. This was in a relatively high-tech XML-based workflow too, not as if we were cobwebbed racks of movable type dinosaurs.
Tom said,
August 13, 2026 @ 5:26 pm
The katakana symbol is "tsu," not "tu."
pfb said,
August 13, 2026 @ 5:40 pm
Just a fussy quibble, but the Unicode name is, in fact, "TU". This is the standard Romanization in the Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki systems, and accepted by all Japanese-language keyboard interfaces I've ever used.
It is, of course, _pronounced_ "tsu", and written that way in the Hepburn system.
Jonathan Smith said,
August 13, 2026 @ 7:11 pm
or katakana s(h)i for a jauntier (?) head-wag: ¯\_(シ)_/¯
Tom Dawkes said,
August 15, 2026 @ 7:16 am
The solidus was in use for centuries as a form of 's' – see the Wikipedia entry on Long s : An echo of the long s survives today in the form of the mark /, popularly known as a "slash" but formally named a solidus. The mark is an evolution of the long s which was used as the abbreviation for 'shilling' in Britain's pre-decimal currency, originally written as in 7ſ 6d, later as "7/6", meaning "seven shillings and six pence".
(I grew up with the British pr-1970 currency L.s.d. or libri, solidi, denarii – what have the Romans ever done for us?)
David Marjanović said,
August 17, 2026 @ 11:00 am
And indeed there is, for example, a caliper brand named Mitutoyo.
Andrew Usher said,
August 17, 2026 @ 9:58 pm
Would any non-Japanese read that name and pronounce it with /ts/, though?
Rodger C said,
August 21, 2026 @ 2:19 pm
Would any non-Japanese read that name and pronounce it with /ts/, though?
They would if they knew anything at all about Japanese.
Chas Belov said,
August 21, 2026 @ 7:14 pm
If I knew it was the "tsu" character, I would pronounce the "ts." I pronounce the "ts" in "tsunami."