The “slash” that we all have on our keyboards, is known as the virgule. The name comes down to us from Latin through French. It served medieval European literature as a comma and still performs this function in English language poetry. We also use it as a separation of like things (2005/2006), and it stands in for or (as in and/or).
The solidus is ever-so-slightly more oblique. It is the typographer’s fraction bar. Solidus was the name of a Roman coin. A Roman pound (libra) was comprised of 72 solidi. The British pound mark, £, is an ancestor of the Roman libra. The English shilling descends from the Roman solidus. The mark which separates British pounds, shillings and pence also came to be called the solidus (£ ⁄ s ⁄ d), and it is also a typographic character which is used to improvise fractions.
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