I am wondering if there is a symbol or glyph to represent the conjunct "and/or". I doubt there is a formal, de jure symbol (i.e., found in any manual of style or dictionary), but I cannot even find any references to de facto usages, nor even invented symbols for it.
Is the virgule the only symbol for it? Is there no other shorthand to represent the concept? Is that sufficient to capture the full meaning (either one or both) of the pair? (If so, I find it peculiar that the virgule is already present in "and/or", and yet can take the place of the whole construct.)
There are a couple of questions regarding "and/or" here, and some of them come peripherally close, but none of them quite touch on this issue.
Best Answer
There is a symbol for it in predicate logic.
"And/or" is just called "or" and is represented as
∨, from the Latin vel meaning or. But note that it's a separate symbol from the letter "v", though similar.In contrast, "or" in the sense of "this one or that one but never both" is called "exclusive or" or "xor" and can be symbolized as
⊻or⊕.Also, in programming you might see "and/or" represented as
|or as||, and "xor" represented as^. Which confusingly looks a lot like∧, used in logic to mean "and".