Uses
Marking errors
Strikethrough is primarily used to mark text that is mistaken or to be removed. Historically, this has also been marked by placing dots under the letters to be ignored ( la, punctum delens).Physics
InHighlighting
In medieval manuscripts such as theComputer representations
HTML
The HTML presentational inline element for strikethrough is<strike>
or <s>
This element was, however, deprecated in the 1999 HTML 4.01 standard, and replaced by the <del>
tag, a semantic element representing deleted text, which user agents (typically web browsers) often render as a strikethrough.15.2.1 Font style elements: the TT, I, B, BIG, SMALL, STRIKE, S, and U elements<s>
, that is strikethrough in HTML 3 and 4, is redefined to mark text that is no longer correct, and secondly, <del>
marks text that has been deleted, as it does in HTML 4.01.4.5.5 The s elementOther markup symbols
* /code> or trike/code>.
* GitHub
GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...
flavored Markdown
Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber and Aaron Swartz created Markdown in 2004 as a markup language that is appealing to human readers in its source code form. Markdown is ...
uses double tilde ~~
to wrap around text for strikethrough.
* Gmail
Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or the official mobile app. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP an ...
chat uses minus sign -
to wrap around text for strikethrough.
CSS
In cascading style sheets (CSS) strikethrough is controlled using the text-decoration
property, and specified by the line-through
value of that property. For example, <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">ABCD efghi</span>
renders like this: ABCD efghi
To maintain backwards compatibility, the following can be added to the CSS:
strike
The example above could then be written like this: <strike>ABCD efghi</strike>
, which is compatible with HTML 4. In HTML 5, this: <del>ABCD efghi</del>
also produces the same result, although the use of CSS is preferred and the del
tag carries a semantic interpretation not present in the purely stylistic s
and strike
tags.
Unicode
Combining characters
In plain text
In computing, plain text is a loose term for data (e.g. file contents) that represent only characters of readable material but not its graphical representation nor other objects (floating-point numbers, images, etc.). It may also include a limit ...
scenarios where markup cannot be used, Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
offers a number of combining character
In digital typography, combining characters are characters that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the combining diacritical marks (including combining accents).
Unicode also ...
s that achieve similar effects.
The “combining long stroke overlay” (U+0336) results in an unbroken stroke across the text:
* A̶B̶C̶D̶ ̶e̶f̶g̶h̶i̶
while the “combining short stroke overlay” (U+0335) results in individually struck out characters:
* A̵B̵C̵D̵ ̵e̵f̵g̵h̵i̵
Similarly, the “combining short solidus overlay” (U+0337) results in diagonally struck out letters:
* A̷B̷C̷D̷ ̷e̷f̷g̷h̷i̷
as does the “combining long solidus overlay” (U+0338), which produces longer diagonal strokes:
* A̸B̸C̸D̸ ̸e̸f̸g̸h̸i̸
Specific struck-through characters
A number of characters that have the visual appearance of struck-through characters exist in Unicode, including ƀ, Đđ, Ððᶞ, Ǥǥ, Ħħꟸ𐞕, Ɨɨᵻᶤᶧ, Ɉɉ, Łłᴌ, Ɵɵ, ꝵꝶ, Ŧ, Ʉʉᵾᶶ, Ƶ, ƻ, ʡ𐞳, ʢ𐞴, Ғғ, Ҟҟ, Ұұ, Ҍҍ. These usually have specific functions (for example, in the Latin Extended-A
Latin Extended-A is a Unicode block and is the third block of the Unicode standard. It encodes Latin letters from the Latin ISO character sets other than Latin-1 (which is already encoded in the Latin-1 Supplement block) and also legacy character ...
character set) or representations and are not intended for general use. However, they are not precomposed characters and have neither canonical nor compatibility decompositions. This issue has created security considerations since "precomposed" characters like U+019F and sequences like U+004F U+0335 or U+004F U+0336 often cause visual confusion (compare Ɵ, O̵ and O̶). Unicode has acknowledged this issue and has proposed a standardized method for counteraction.
For slashed letters in an orthography, unitary letters are provided by Unicode. The diacritics are used in generic applications, such as math operators which systematically use the solidus overlay to indicate negation.
Double/multiple strikethrough
Double strikethrough is an option in certain word processing
A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consen ...
applications such as Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is a word processing software developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name ''Multi-Tool Word'' for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms includin ...
. There is no generally agreed meaning of double strikethrough, but it may be used as a second level of single strikethrough.
In Japan, double strikethrough is conventionally used (rather than single strikethrough) when striking out text. This is for added clarity, as in complex kanji
are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese ...
a single strikethrough may be missed or confused with a stroke in the character.
Double, triple or multiple strikethrough may also (especially formerly) be used as a way of emphasising words.
Research
Since at least 2014, researchers in the area of optical character recognition
Optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a scen ...
have attempted to solve the problem of recognizing struck-out text in handwritten documents.
See also
*Bar (diacritic)
A bar or stroke is a modification consisting of a line drawn through a grapheme. It may be used as a diacritic to derive new letters from old ones, or simply as an addition to make a grapheme more distinct from others. It can take the form of a v ...
References
{{Typography
Typography