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
No idea, but it might be connected with shorthand, which was a common and sophisticated note-taking technique that allowed people, mostly secretaries in business, to write as fast as talking.
Almost certainly it originated from pen and paper shorthand. The internet has a lot of history in regard to it potentially being due to T9 slang, but I remember it being shown to me before cellphones were in wide use.
If that annoys you, never get into advanced maths. There’s arbitrary symbols that make no sense like 3 dots in a triangle means therefore. An upside down capital A means for all.
I still use the three dots for therefore sometimes without really thinking about it. I never pursued work in maths or physics (I set and run industrial machines) but for some reason that one always stuck with me from school.
I just use TF as i need it all the time for notes and stuff, but really wish I could use the 3 triangle dots, which I learned to use in logic. I wish the emoji picker (ctrl+period) could accept a searches for more symbols. On windows a search for the cucumber emoji works, but you can’t search for greek letters. sigh
Tbf, it’s not just math. The .•. is used pretty often in philosophy (in writing out logical arguments), and I’ve seen it other places occasionally. Not saying you’re wrong, just adding unnecessary context lol
Mathematicians didn’t want to write a conclusion paragraph to their proofs to say that that result proves what they wanted to show, so they just put “QED” at the end which is some Latin/Greek phrase to the effect.
Then they got too lazy to write that because they do proofs all the time, so they just put a box ∎ that means “so, basically yeah. there you have it.”
To me it makes sense, as I first encountered it in video games where abbreviations, acronyms, and text-saving-slang are commonplace. Furthermore, while abbreviations usually have multiple letters (in written text, not physical or mathematical equations), single letter abbreviations can quickly become confusing, so I belive that this is the reason for putting a slash behind it, or possibly a bar above it.
RANT: While I know that language changes all the time, I find it very unfortunate that this little fellow o/ and possibly his slightly more formal friend o7 have become synonymous with “nazi salute”. First off, it’s the wrong arm! And second off, what do you have against “man waving” and “man saluting”?
It must be very confusing for someone who uses this newer definition of o/ to visit the Elite:Dangerous forums.
EDIT: I’m very happy that I apparently am the only one who has met people who don’t know the real meaning of o/ and o7. I feared that this was a widespread problem, but luckily it appears that I simply am a worrywart.
RANT: While I know that language changes all the time, I find it very unfortunate that this little fellow o/ and possibly his slightly more formal friend o7 have become synonymous with “nazi heil”. First off, it’s the wrong arm! And second off, what do you have against “man waving” and “man saluting”.
RANT: While I know that language changes all the time, I find it very unfortunate that this little fellow o/ and possibly his slightly more formal friend o7 have become synonymous with “nazi salute”. First off, it’s the wrong arm! And second off, what do you have against “man waving” and “man saluting”?
Have they really? Never seen o7 used that way, with o/ it's more understandable, but since one can easily just use \o (or use an actual unicode swastika) I just don't see it getting that controversial. Seems even less known than the triple parentheses thing, which is something that most people who don't spend their lives on the internet never heard about.
It must be very confusing for someone who uses this newer definition of o/ to visit the Elite:Dangerous forums.
EVE online players have done the o7 salute for decades. And while I’ll gladly admit that every single longtime EVE player is at least something of an asshole (it’s a requirement to really enjoy the game) I doubt the majority are cryptofascists.
People have needed quick notations for as long as language has been written. While I’m not going digging for links because fuck that shit for a casual comment, it remains true in every form of writing around the world that I’ve read about (obviously, I can’t read them all, and the few I can I don’t read well, but that’s why linguists get paid to do it for a living).
The / is very commonly used to denote that the rest of a word has been “slashed” off of the previous section. It is intuitive to a degree in that it has been used for that in multiple places independently. Using a single symbol for that is very common.
It happening with with is just the most common example that most people will run into. Moreover, it’s typically applied in situations where the expected readers will be aware of that shorthand.
As an example, one of the nursing homes I worked at used a letter slash system for a lot of the common tasks we’d perform on our big whiteboard. You’d have room numbers and letters (for two bed rooms), with a grid. If you gave the patient their shower, you’d note s/. Bed bath would be b/. Meals were denoted with the first letter and slash except breakfast, which got m/ for morning (because b was already taken).
Now, we used lower case for tasks and upper case for initials as well, so that you could come up between rooms, make the note, and sign it in just seconds. When you’re taking care of 30+ patients per hall, those seconds are valuable.
The w/ notation has been used for hundreds of years that I know of. I saw copies of colonial era logs that used it, and they went back to the 1600s iirc.
But, let’s give another example to help you get that it’s really no different from another word that happens to mean the same thing as with. If I say something is big, you’ve probably seen the word before, right? Picking up English as a second language usually means starting with smaller adjectives.
But, there’s other words that mean the same thing, or the same thing at a different scale large means the same as big. Huge means the same basic thing, but is typically used to mean “very big”. So, huge is a kind of shorthand too, in use. But until you encounter it the first time, it’s no more intuitive than big.
Then, the glory of English means we get all kinds of surplus words. Gargantuan, brobdingnagian, massive, they all mean that something is very big.
So, just think of w/ as a very small word that happens to share a single letter with the word with, and you simply hadn’t run across it. Nobody has the entirety of English in their heads, even vocabulary geeks. We all eventually run across something new to us, though the longer you read in English, the less often it occurs.
Now, why the slash? As opposed to some other symbol like -, :, or whatever. Think about writing with a stylus, brush, or quill pen. Dots and slashes are the easiest things to write, and are thus the fastest.
If you’re on a dock, scribbling down the load that’s coming in, you need that speed. When you’re keeping log books of any kind, you need to minimize hand strain, so fewer symbols means less strain.
W/ is the OMG or lol of more important things. It’s just another way of saving space and/or time
The ampersand (&) was so commonly used that for a while it was taught as a letter. British schoolkids in the mid- to late-19th century would include it as the 27th letter on writing work and needlework samplers, usually after “z”.
There’s some discussion that the Alphabet Song ends with “w, x, y & z” specifically to include it.
All in all, the / is just one style of abbreviation used in English. It’s not only used for “with”, but also a few other words (w/o = without, N/A = not applicable).
In German we abbreviate using a dot (e.g. “m.” = “mit” = "with). That’s not more or less intuitive, it’s just what you are used to.
What’s kinda special with English is that there are multiple abbreviation styles. Off the top of my head I can think of six styles:
Abbreviate random parts of words using a slash: “N/A”, “w/”, "w/o"
Abbreviate keeping only the first letter of a word using a dot: "e.g."
Abbreviate keeping the first and some random later consonants (and sometimes consonants that aren’t in the word at all) without using punctuation: Dr, Mr, Ms, Mrs
Abbreviate using acronyms and no punctuation: BBC
Abbreviate using acronyms and dots: B.C.
Abbreviate by substituting parts of the word with a single letter: Xmas (Christmas), Xing (Crossing)
Yeah, “O.K.” came first, “okay” was later. It has a weird history. According to the American Heritage Dictionary:
During the 1830s there was a humoristic fashion in Boston newspapers to reduce a phrase to initials and supply an explanation in parentheses. Sometimes the abbreviations were misspelled to add to the humor. OK was used in March 1839 as an abbreviation for all correct, the joke being that neither the O nor the K was correct. Originally spelled with periods, this term outlived most similar abbreviations owing to its use in President Martin Van Buren’s 1840 campaign for reelection. Because he was born in Kinderhook, New York, Van Buren was nicknamed Old Kinderhook, and the abbreviation proved eminently suitable for political slogans.
I learned similar shorthand from an accountant, who wrote transfer (money transfer between accounts) as tx.
Also, it used to be obligatory to put the dot on Mr., Mrs., Dr., etc. I'm old, I remember how it was taught. And we called those dots "periods". I haven't been in school in decades, but I've been noticing those dots disappearing.
Now that I know it though, it’s a good way to distinguish between similar common abbreviations. For instance I know you don’t mean “Actually” even though I’m not sure what you do mean by A11y.
Abbreviate keeping the first and some random later consonants (and sometimes consonants that aren’t in the word at all) without using punctuation: Dr, Mr, Ms, Mrs
I think it’s usually the first letter(s) and the last letter(s). In older English handwritings I’ve come across M.ʳ etc. So I think that’s were those came from.
In the Speedwriting shorthand system, developed in 1924 for use with typewriter, / Is used to denote omitted sylables, so ‘with’ becomes w/ and ‘without’ becomes w/o. Here is a pretty deep guide on the precepts of Speedwriting:
In German many people, web mailers and also sometimes even email software use “AW:” (short for AntWort) instead of “Re:” and then some of them don’t even recognize the existence of a previous “AW:” or “Re:” giving you such wondrous email subjects as: “AW: Re: AW: Re: AW: AW: Re: AW: Re: really important subject” 🤦
It’s really hard to get thousands of software development companies, hundreds of thousands of hosters and billions of users to unitedly go for a new thing.
It would make much more sense these days to simply leave the subject line intact then have the mail client display the “reply” or “forwarded” lingo on its own.
It’s a computer so it should be smart enough to know what’s happening by looking at the headers. I never understand when we make computers do stupid things instead of actually programming them to be smart. Otherwise what’s the point of using them?
Dr., Mrs., Ms. etc. are traditionally abbreviated with periods/dots but it does raise issues typing on one’s phone because autocorrect thinks it’s the end of a sentence, so sans dots is becoming more common. And there’s other examples which have never had dots, like nvm and af
X is a little special, it stands for Cross and therefore also for Christ. When illiterate medieval people had to sign documents they were told to make the sign of the Cross, since they were usually swearing
Edit: anyone else always pronounce PED XING as pedexing instead of pedestrian crossing?
For instance, if you want to text someone “I have an appointment with the Dr. at 11 on Tuesday”. Depending on the dr’s name it might be more to type than someone cares to, especially if it isn’t the most pertinent piece of information.
Because, as you probably just noticed, it’s sometimes part of a sentence, used without the name. Maybe I’m texting “Dr says it’s not a tumor, I’m pregnant” or something.
In addition, Dr (w/ or w/o .) sometimes means Drive, and USPS sorting machines prefer no dots, so that might also drive autotype to choose dotless, or at least offer it.
I don’t think writing “the Dr told me X” is normal because it’s in the middle of the sentence. Especially if it’s capitalized because that signifies that it’s a title, but you’re not using the title (unless we’re talking about German which we’re not).
As a non-Christian, I never made that Xmas connection. It sounds cool, but I was never sure why anyone started calling that (and evidently never curious enough to go looking for an answer or even really ask, I just kinda took it as one of those things that is how it is because people are going to people).
As a non-Christian, I never made that Xmas connection.
Well, as a Christian, I wouldn’t feel bad about it because the poster is not correct. The X in Xmas does not stand for a cross, it comes from the Greek spelling of Christ which is Χριστός. The chi-rho symbol (☧) is an imposition of the first two letters (Χ and ρ) and is still commonly used to refer to Christ in some denominations.
As a bonus: if you’ve ever wondered (or not wondered) why some Christian symbolism uses a fish, ἸΧΘΥΣ (or ICTHYS) is an acronym for Ἰησοῦς Χρῑστός Θεοῦ Υἱός Σωτήρ, “which translates into English as ‘Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior’.” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthys) This has been used since the first century.
Oddly enough, people who didn’t know that part of the history got angry “they took Christ out of Christmas!” So then people who liked the holiday but not the religion used it to do exactly that. As you say, people people.
Abbreviate using the first and then any choice of following letter that differentiates it from the other possibilities in a specific group: AL, AR, AK, AZ… MA, ME, MD, MI, MN, MS, MO, MT… WA, WI, WV, WY!
Well tbf those are post codes designed by the postal service to represent states. I wouldn’t really count it as a naturally developed abbreviation like the ones above, it’s no different from .fr, .es, .co.uk, etc.
The abbreviations for states used before the two-letter ones, however, are much weirder! E.g. Penna. for Pennsylvania
Tbf iirc the USPS had to make sure they didn’t conflict with other previously existing abbreviations. Although as someone living in LA, CA* they didn’t quite succeed
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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