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The slashed zero is a representation of the Arabic digit " 0" (zero) with a
slash Slash may refer to: * Slash (punctuation), the "/" character Arts and entertainment Fictional characters * Slash (Marvel Comics) * Slash (''Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles'') Music * Harry Slash & The Slashtones, an American rock band * Nash ...
through it. The slashed zero glyph is often used to distinguish the digit "zero" ("0") from the
Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern ...
letter " O" anywhere that the distinction needs emphasis, particularly in encoding systems, scientific and engineering applications,
computer programming Computer programming is the process of performing a particular computation (or more generally, accomplishing a specific computing result), usually by designing and building an executable computer program. Programming involves tasks such as anal ...
(such as
software development Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development invo ...
), and telecommunications. It thus helps to differentiate characters that would otherwise be
homoglyph In orthography and typography, a homoglyph is one of two or more graphemes, characters, or glyphs with shapes that appear identical or very similar. The designation is also applied to sequences of characters sharing these properties. Synoglyph ...
s. It was commonly used during the
punch card A punched card (also punch card or punched-card) is a piece of stiff paper that holds digital data represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Punched cards were once common in data processing applications or to di ...
era, when programs were typically written out by hand, to avoid ambiguity when the character was later typed on a card punch.


Usage

The slashed zero is used in a number of fields in order to avoid confusion with the letter 'O'. It is used by
computer programmer A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software. A programmer is someone who writes/creates ...
s, in recording
amateur radio Amateur radio, also known as ham radio, is the use of the radio frequency spectrum for purposes of non-commercial exchange of messages, wireless experimentation, self-training, private recreation, radiosport, contesting, and emergency commu ...
call signs and in military radio, as logs of such contacts tend to contain both letters and numerals. The slashed zero was used on teleprinter circuits for weather applications. In this usage it was sometimes called communications zero. The slashed zero can be used in
stoichiometry Stoichiometry refers to the relationship between the quantities of reactants and products before, during, and following chemical reactions. Stoichiometry is founded on the law of conservation of mass where the total mass of the reactants equ ...
to avoid confusion with the symbol for
oxygen Oxygen is the chemical element with the symbol O and atomic number 8. It is a member of the chalcogen group in the periodic table, a highly reactive nonmetal, and an oxidizing agent that readily forms oxides with most elements ...
(capital O). The slashed zero is also used in charting and documenting in the medical and healthcare fields to avoid confusion with the letter 'O'. It also denotes an absence of something (similar to the usage of an '
empty set In mathematics, the empty set is the unique set having no elements; its size or cardinality (count of elements in a set) is zero. Some axiomatic set theories ensure that the empty set exists by including an axiom of empty set, while in othe ...
' character), such as a sign or a symptom. Slashed zeroes can also be used on
cheque A cheque, or check (American English; see spelling differences) is a document that orders a bank (or credit union) to pay a specific amount of money from a person's account to the person in whose name the cheque has been issued. The pers ...
s in order to prevent fraud, for example: Changing a 0 to an 8. Slashed zeros are used on New Zealand number plates.


History

The slashed zero predates computers, and is known to have been used in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In the days of the
typewriter A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of keys, and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an inked ribbon selectivel ...
, there was no key for the slashed zero. Typists could generate it by first typing either an uppercase "O" or a zero and then
backspace Backspace () is the keyboard key that originally pushed the typewriter carriage one position backwards and in modern computer systems moves the display cursor one position backwards,"Backwards" means to the left for left-to-right languages. delete ...
, followed by typing the slash key. The result would look very much like a slashed zero. It is used in many Baudot
teleprinter A teleprinter (teletypewriter, teletype or TTY) is an electromechanical device that can be used to send and receive typed messages through various communications channels, in both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations. Init ...
applications, specifically the keytop and typepallet that combines "P" and slashed zero. Additionally, the slashed zero is used in many
ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...
graphic sets descended from the default typewheel on the
Teletype Model 33 The Teletype Model 33 is an electromechanical teleprinter designed for light-duty office use. It is less rugged and cost less than earlier Teletype machines. The Teletype Corporation introduced the Model 33 as a commercial product in 1963 af ...
. The use of the slashed zero by many computer systems of the 1970s and 1980s inspired the 1980s
space rock Space rock is a music genre characterized by loose and lengthy song structures centered on instrumental textures that typically produce a hypnotic, otherworldly sound. It may feature distorted and reverberation-laden guitars, minimal drummin ...
band Underground Zerø to use a
heavy metal umlaut A metal umlaut is a diacritic that is sometimes used gratuitously or decoratively over letters in the names of mainly hard rock or heavy metal music, heavy metal bands—for example, those of Blue Öyster Cult, Queensrÿche, Motörhead, the Accüs ...
Scandinavian
vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (len ...
'' ø'' in the band's name and as the band logo on all their album covers (see link below). Along with the
Westminster Westminster is an area of Central London, part of the wider City of Westminster. The area, which extends from the River Thames to Oxford Street, has many visitor attractions and historic landmarks, including the Palace of Westminster, B ...
, MICR, and OCR-A fonts, the slashed zero became one of the things associated with
hacker culture The hacker culture is a subculture of individuals who enjoy—often in collective effort—the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming the limitations of software systems or electronic hardware (mostly digital electronics), to a ...
in the 1980s. Some cartoons depicted computer users talking in
binary code A binary code represents text, computer processor instructions, or any other data using a two-symbol system. The two-symbol system used is often "0" and "1" from the binary number system. The binary code assigns a pattern of binary digits, als ...
with 1s and 0s using a ''slashed zero'' for the 0. Slashed zeroes have been used in the Flash-based artwork of
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (장영혜중공업) is a Seoul-based Web art group consisting of Young-hae Chang and Marc Voge. The group formed in 1999. Young-Hae Chang, is a Korean artist and translator with a Ph.D in aesthetics from Universi ...
, notably in their 2003 work, ''Operation Nukorea''. The reason for their use is unknown, but has been conjectured to be related to themes of 'negation, erasure, and absence'.


Similar symbols

The ''slashed zero'' has the disadvantage that it can be confused with several other symbols. See the disambiguation page for the symbol Ø for a comprehensive listing:
Ø (disambiguation) ''Ø (Disambiguation)'' is the seventh studio album by American metalcore band Underoath. Released on November 9, 2010, through Tooth & Nail Records, the album was the band's only without founding member Aaron Gillespie, and is the first and o ...
.


Representation in Unicode and HTML

In
Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...
, slashed zero is considered a typographic variation of the Arabic digit zero , which is code point . Since nearly all software requires each base-10 digit to have only a single, unique semantic representation, Unicode defines no code point (other than ) for altering the visual appearance of zero. This means that the slashed zero
glyph A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...
is displayed for only—''and then always''—when a font whose designer chose the option is active. Successful display on a particular local system depends on making sure that such a font is available there, either via the system's font files or via font embedding, and also ensuring it is selected. As an explicit visual representation, Unicode supports slashed zero only indirectly, not as a single-character
code point In character encoding terminology, a code point, codepoint or code position is a numerical value that maps to a specific character. Code points usually represent a single grapheme—usually a letter, digit, punctuation mark, or whitespace—but ...
, but as two characters are paired in a combining sequence. see Combining solidus below. Unicode 9.0 introduced another method to create a short diagonal stroked form by adding the Variation Selector 1 after the zero, on this browser it produces .


Typography

In most typographic designs, the slash of a slashed zero usually does not extend past the ellipse. Compare this to the Scandinavian
vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (len ...
" Ø", the "
empty set In mathematics, the empty set is the unique set having no elements; its size or cardinality (count of elements in a set) is zero. Some axiomatic set theories ensure that the empty set exists by including an axiom of empty set, while in othe ...
" symbol "∅" and the diameter symbol
In geometry, a diameter of a circle is any straight line segment that passes through the center of the circle and whose endpoints lie on the circle. It can also be defined as the longest chord of the circle. Both definitions are also valid for ...
. A convention common on early line printers left zero unornamented but added a tail or hook to the letter-O so that it resembled an inverted Q (like U+213A ) or
cursive Cursive (also known as script, among other names) is any style of penmanship in which characters are written joined in a flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing faster, in contrast to block letters. It varies in functionali ...
capital letter-O (\,\mathcal \,). In the Fixedsys typeface, the numeral 0 has two internal barbs along the lines of the slash. This appears much like a white "S" within the black borders of the zero. In the
FE-Schrift The or ('forgery-impeding typeface') is a sans serif typeface introduced for use on licence plates. Its monospaced letters and numbers are slightly disproportionate to prevent easy modification and to improve machine readability. It has be ...
typeface, used on German car license plates, the zero is rectangular and has an "insinuated" slash: a diagonal crack just beneath the top right curve.


Typefaces

Typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands o ...
s commonly found on
personal computers A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...
that use the slashed zero include: *
Terminal Terminal may refer to: Computing Hardware * Terminal (electronics), a device for joining electrical circuits together * Terminal (telecommunication), a device communicating over a line * Computer terminal, a set of primary input and output devi ...
in
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...
's
Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for se ...
line. *
Consolas Consolas is a monospaced typeface designed by Luc(as) de Groot. It is a part of the ClearType Font Collection, a suite of fonts that take advantage of Microsoft's ClearType font rendering technology. It has been included with Windows since Window ...
in
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...
's
Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...
,
Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, ...
,
Microsoft Office 2007 Microsoft Office 2007 (codenamed Office 12) is an office suite for Windows, developed and published by Microsoft. It was officially revealed on March 9, 2006 and was the 12th version of Microsoft Office. It was released to manufacturing on Novem ...
and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 * Menlo in
macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...
*
Monaco Monaco (; ), officially the Principality of Monaco (french: Principauté de Monaco; Ligurian: ; oc, Principat de Mónegue), is a sovereign city-state and microstate on the French Riviera a few kilometres west of the Italian region of Lig ...
in
macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...
* SF Mono in
macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...
* The
Fedora A fedora () is a hat with a soft brim and indented crown.Kilgour, Ruth Edwards (1958). ''A Pageant of Hats Ancient and Modern''. R. M. McBride Company. It is typically creased lengthwise down the crown and "pinched" near the front on both side ...
Linux distribution ships with a tweaked variant of the Liberation typeface which adds a slash to the zero; this is not present on most other Linux distributions. * ProFont * Roboto Mono Dotted zero typefaces: * The DejaVu family of typefaces has a "DejaVu Sans Mono" variant with a dotted zero. *
Andalé Mono Andalé Mono (for technical reasons also Andale Mono) is a monospaced sans-serif typeface designed by Steve Matteson for terminal emulation and software development environments, originally for the Taligent project by Apple Inc. and IBM. Andalé ...
has a dotted zero. * IBM Plex Mono uses a dotted zero. *
Source Code Pro Source Code Pro is a monospaced sans serif typeface created by Paul D. Hunt for Adobe Systems. It is the second open-source font family from Adobe, distributed under the SIL Open Font License. Source Code Pro (2012) Source Code Pro is a set o ...
and its associated typefaces use a dotted zero.


Variations


Dotted zero

The zero with a dot in the center seems to have originated as an option on
IBM 3270 The IBM 3270 is a family of block oriented display and printer computer terminals introduced by IBM in 1971 and normally used to communicate with IBM mainframes. The 3270 was the successor to the IBM 2260 display terminal. Due to the te ...
display controllers. The dotted zero may appear similar to the
Greek letter The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as ...
theta Theta (, ; uppercase: Θ or ; lowercase: θ or ; grc, ''thē̂ta'' ; Modern: ''thī́ta'' ) is the eighth letter of the Greek alphabet, derived from the Phoenician letter Teth . In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 9. G ...
(particularly capital theta, Θ), but the two have different
glyphs A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...
. In raster fonts, the theta usually has a horizontal line connecting, or nearly touching, the sides of an O; while the dotted zero simply has a dot in the middle. However, on a low-definition display, such a form can be confused with a numeral 8. In some fonts the IPA letter for a bilabial click (ʘ) looks similar to the dotted zero. Alternatively, the dot can become a vertical trace, for example by adding a "combining short vertical line overlay" (U+20D3). It may be coded as 0⃓ giving 0⃓.


Slashed letter 'O'

IBM (and a few other early mainframe makers) used a convention in which the letter O had a slash and the digit 0 did not. This is even more problematic for
Danes Danes ( da, danskere, ) are a North Germanic ethnic group and nationality native to Denmark and a modern nation identified with the country of Denmark. This connection may be ancestral, legal, historical, or cultural. Danes generally regard t ...
, Faroese, and
Norwegians Norwegians ( no, nordmenn) are a North Germanic peoples, North Germanic ethnic group and nation native to Norway, where they form the vast majority of the population. They share a common culture and speak the Norwegian language. Norwegians a ...
because it means two of their letters—the O and slashed O ( Ø)—are visually similar. This was later flipped and most mainframe chain or band printers used the opposite convention (letter O printed as is, and digit zero printed with a slash Ø). This was the de facto standard from 1970s to 1990s. However current use of network laser printers that use PC style fonts caused the demise of the slashed zero in most companies – only a few configured laser printers to use Ø.


Combining solidus

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...
supports combining characters, which overlay the preceding character to create a composite glyph. This can be used to obtain a crude typographic approximation where the slash is contained within the zero. It is treated literally as "a zero that is slashed", and it is coded as two characters: a standard zero followed by either "combining short solidus overlay" or "combining long solidus overlay" . For example, placing the "long solidus", which may be written in
HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaS ...
as , appears as . Using the "short solidus overlay" after a standard zero character is coded as and produces the following: .


Reversed slash

Some Burroughs/
Unisys Unisys Corporation is an American multinational information technology (IT) services and consulting company headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. It provides digital workplace solutions, cloud, applications, and infrastructure solutions, ...
equipment displays a zero with a ''reversed'' slash, similar to the no symbol,  ⃠.


See also

*
0 (number) 0 (zero) is a number representing an empty quantity. In place-value notation such as the Hindu–Arabic numeral system, 0 also serves as a placeholder numerical digit, which works by multiplying digits to the left of 0 by the radix, usu ...
* Symbols for zero *
Names for the number 0 in English " Zero" is the usual name for the number 0 in English. In British English "nought" is also used. In American English "naught" is used occasionally for zero, but (as with British English) "naught" is more often used as an archaic word for nothing. ...
* Arabic numeral variations#Slashed zero * Regional handwriting variation#Arabic numerals


Footnotes


References


Further reading

*; .


External links

*{{citation , chapter-url= http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/0/numeral-zero.html , chapter= 0 , title= The Jargon File , publisher= Eric S Raymond.
Underground Zerø Album Cover
Underground Zerø Band Logo Typographical symbols Numeral systems 0 (number)