solidus

Meaning

Noun

• Various medieval and early modern coins or units of account, particularly:
• The weight of the Roman gold coin, 1/60 of a Roman pound under Diocletian or 1/72 lb. (about 4.5 grams) after Constantine.
• A medieval French weight, 1/20 of the Carolingian pound.
• Synonym of slash ⟨/⟩, originally in its use as the shilling mark and now its formal designation by the ISO and Unicode.
• The formal name of the oblique strikethrough overlay (as in A̷ and B̸) in Unicode.
• The division line between the numerator and the denominator of a fraction, whether horizontal or oblique.
• The line in a phase diagram marking the temperatures and pressures below which a given substance is a stable solid.

Related

Similar words

• nomisma, bezant
• nomisma, hyperpyron, bezant
• See slash and strikethrough

Origin

• From Middle English solidus, from classical Latin solidus ("solid"), see below.
• In numismatic and weight senses, via medieval Latin solidus ("various coins"), from Late Latin solidus ("a gold coin of the Roman Empire"). In chemical sense, via German Solidus, coined by H.W.B. Roozeboom in his 1899 Zeitschrift für Physikalische Chemie, Stöchiometrie, und Verwandtschaftslehre (XXX, page 387).
• In typography, from the shilling mark originally being an abbreviation (a long s ⟨ſ⟩), of Medieval Latin solidus meaning shilling.