The division sign () is a mathematical symbol consisting of a short horizontal line with a dot above and another dot below, used in Anglophone countries to indicate the operation of division. This usage is not universal and the symbol has different meanings in other countries. Consequently, its use to denote division is deprecated in the ISO 80000-2 standard for notations used in mathematics, science and technology. Some near-contemporaries believed that John Pell, who edited the book, may have been responsible for this use of the symbol. The ISO 80000-2 standard for mathematical notation in science and technology recommends only the solidus or "fraction bar" for division, or the "colon" for ratios; it says that the sign "should not be used" for division. Nevertheless, continues to be used on scientific calculators.

In Italy, Poland and Russia, the same sign was sometimes used to denote a range of values, and in Scandinavian countries it was, and sometimes still is, used as a negation sign: the Unicode Consortium has allocated a separate code point, for this usage uniquely; the exact form of the symbol displayed is typeface (font) dependent.

In computer systems

Encoding

The symbol was assigned to code point 0xF7 in ISO 8859-1, as the "division sign". This encoding was transferred to Unicode as U+00F7. In HTML, it can be encoded as or (at HTML level 3.2), or as .

Unicode provides various division symbols:

{| class="wikitable"

! Codepoint !! Name !! Symbol

|-

| U+00F7 || Division Sign || ÷

|-

| U+27CC || Long Division || ⟌

|-

| U+2215 || Division Slash || ∕

|-

| U+2A38 || Circled Division Sign || ⨸

|-

| U+2797 || Heavy Division Sign || ➗

|-

| U+2298 || Circled Division Slash || ⊘

|-

| U+22C7 || Division Times || ⋇

|-

| U+29BC || Circled Anticlockwise-Rotated Division Sign || ⦼

|}

Use

Most programming languages use only the 128 ASCII characters, and so do not use the ÷ character. However, the programming language APL uses ÷ for the unary reciprocal operator and the binary division operator.

See also

  • Plus and minus signs
  • Multiplication sign

Notes

  • Jeff Miller: Earliest Uses of Various Mathematical Symbols
  • Michael Quinion: Where our arithmetic symbols come from