Editing Slash (punctuation) (section)

===Dates <span class="anchor" id="Dating"></span>===
Slashes are a common [[calendar date]] separator<ref name="solidhart" /> used [[Date format by country|across many countries]] and by some standards such as the [[Common Log Format]] used by web servers. Depending on context, it may be in the form Day/Month/Year, Month/Day/Year, or Year/Month/Day. If only two elements are present, they typically denote a day and month in some order. For example, [[9/11]] is a common American way of writing the date 11 September; Britons write this as 11/9. Owing to the ambiguity across cultures, the practice of using only two elements to denote a date is sometimes proscribed.<ref>{{cite book |title=[[The Chicago Manual of Style]] |edition=16th |publisher=[[University of Chicago Press]] |date=2016 |at=6.106}}</ref>

Because of the world's many varying [[Date and time notation by country|conventional date and time formats]], [[ISO 8601]] advocates the use of a Year-Month-Day system separated by hyphens (e.g., [[Victory in Europe Day]] occurred on 1945-05-08). In the ISO 8601 system, slashes represent date ranges: "1939/1945" represents what is more commonly written in [[Anglophone]] countries as "1939–1945". The autumn term of a northern-hemisphere school year might be marked "2010-09-01/12-22".

In English, a range marked by a slash often has a separate meaning from one marked by a dash or hyphen.<ref name="solidhart" /> "24/25 December" would mark the time shared by both days (i.e., the night from [[Christmas Eve]] to [[Christmas Day|Christmas morning]]) rather than the time made up by both days together, which would be written "24–25 December". Similarly, a historical reference to "1066/67" might imply an event occurred during the winter of late 1066 and early 1067,<ref>{{cite book |title=[[The Chicago Manual of Style]] |edition=16th |publisher=[[University of Chicago Press]] |date=2016 |at=6.105}}</ref> whereas a reference to 1066–67 would cover the entirety of both years. The usage was particularly common in British English during [[World War II]], where such slash dates were used for [[night-bombing]] [[strategic bombing|air raids]]. It is also used by some police forces in the United States.