Where did the abbreviation "w/" for "with" come from?
Hi, English isn’t my mother tongue so I was asking myself that question since I first encounted a w/… Back then I was like: “What tf does ‘w slash’ stand for?” And when I found out I was like “How, why, and is it any intuitive?” But I never dared to ask that until now
I know this isn’t an answer on the topic of the history of abbreviations, but I found this page to have a useful list of abbreviations with the foreign speaker in mind.
As others said, with as w/ was around as part of secretarial shorthand, which got taught to most people keeping corporate documentation and it stuck.
There are a lot of abbreviations like that in the English language that came from abbreviations in written form due to the media in was written in, whether it was newspapers, telegraph, handwritten shorthand, or computer based. It may not make sense because English isn’t a language designed to make sense; it isn’t even designed.
French is heavily managed by the Académie, I guess it depends how you interpret “designed”. English is a much freer language that morphs and absorbs terms from many languages.
I wonder how much of the managed-language sticks vs the emergent-language. I recall years ago there was news of how the academie made up their own word for email.
My guess is these became common with the telegraph. Since messages were expensive and the sender paid by the letter, abbreviations where commonly used to keep messages short.
Some various answers here; but for me, it came from w/o as a shorthand for ‘without’, then I started sometimes writing w/ for ‘with’ and wondering if that’s okay!
I’m not a linguist, but to me, langauge is fluid, in that it’s fine to use it any way you want, so long as the people involved can interpret it as intended.
Which means when you write a note in shorthand for yourself, so long as you can come back to it and decipher it at whatever point you need it then it’s fine.
If someone were to happen to come across it then there is a concern that they may interpret it wrong. As a silly example: If “I will fuck your mom” was your code for “I will pick up milk and eggs from the grocery store”, you can see how people (which could include you later) can interpret your message incorrectly, and you should pick a better shorthand in that case.
When communicating with others you’ll have contexts of what kind of things are relevant, like PoS may mean different things if you are talking to a store manager vs. your buddy, you have to be sure your listener or reader gets the correct version.
I’m just adding an additional source, because I just recently read about this way of using the forward slash to create abbreviations. English Language & Usage has a good post on Stackexchange. Wikipedia says they are used for “two-letter initialisms” (a type of abbreviation). Wikipedia also provides some more examples, see here.
University shortcut. When you have to take notes on paper so damn fast, you develop techniques. Those techniques get shared around. That’s how it was explained to me.
Back when business was done entirely by paper, you'd have catalogues, books full of tables of things you could order with their prices. You have limited space for printing item names and those abbreviations were used there (e.g. in the 1920s).
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