solidus

The slash / also known by the technical term solidus, 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 Technically ‘reverse solidus’ is a misnomer, since the character is a reversed slash, not a reversed solidus. The slash goes back to the days of ancient Rome. In the early modern period, in Fraktur script, which was widespread through Europe in the Middle Ages, one slash  represented a comma, while two slashes // represented a dash. In Western orthography, the two slashes initially evolved into a double oblique hyphen ⸗, that further evolved into a double hyphen, similar to the equals sign =, before being simplified to a single dash –