Learn English – “B&W” or “B/W”

abbreviationsword-choice

I've seen both B/W and B&W used to describe black and white. Is one accepted over the other? If regional, then what would I use in AmE?

Best Answer

I think it would be slightly odd if there were an 'industry standard' for this one. Even odder if the general speaking / writing public both knew of that standard and actually used it.

As noted in a comment against OP, you can't check this one with Ngrams because that doesn't support the slash character in search terms.

But you can Google for

"b/w" movies which reports 6,650,000 hits, and

"b&w" movies which reports 4,570,000.

If I add the word american I get 2,960,000 as against 2,310,000. That's much the same ratio, which may imply there're no particular tendency for Americans to favour one term over the other.

I can't restrict Google to US sites only, but I can restrict it to UK only. That gives twice as many hits for b/w, which may suggest that we Brits prefer the slash form. I know I do.

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