Division sign

"÷" redirects here. For the music album of this name, see ÷ (album). For the Tifinagh character, see ⴻ.

For other signs used for division, see Division (mathematics) § Notation.

The division sign (÷) is a mathematical symbol consisting of a short horizontal line with a dot above and another dot below, used in Anglophone countries to indicate the operation of division. This usage is not universal and the symbol has different meanings in other countries. Consequently, its use to denote division is not recommended in the ISO 80000-2 standard for mathematical notation.^[1]

÷
Division sign
In Unicode	U+00F7 ÷ DIVISION SIGN (÷, ÷)
Different from
Different from	U+2052 ⁒ COMMERCIAL MINUS SIGN U+002B + PLUS SIGN U+2020 † DAGGER U+034B ͋ COMBINING HOMOTHETIC ABOVE
Related
See also	U+2236 ∶ RATIO U+003A : COLON U+002F / SOLIDUS U+2044 ⁄ FRACTION SLASH U+2215 ∕ DIVISION SLASH

In mathematics

Plus and minuses. The obelus – or division sign – used as a variant of the minus sign in an excerpt from an official Norwegian trading statement form called «Næringsoppgave 1» for the taxation year 2010.

Further information: Division (mathematics) § Notation

The obelus, a historical glyph consisting of a horizontal line with (or without) one or more dots, was first used as a symbol for division in 1659, in the algebra book Teutsche Algebra by Johann Rahn, although previous writers had used the same symbol for subtraction.^[2] Some near-contemporaries believed that John Pell, who edited the book, may have been responsible for this use of the symbol.^[2] Other symbols for division include the slash or solidus /, the colon :, and the fraction bar (the horizontal bar in a vertical fraction).^[3][4] The ISO 80000-2 standard for mathematical notation recommends only the solidus / or "fraction bar" for division, or the "colon" : for ratios; it says that the ÷ sign "should not be used" for division.^[1]

In Italy, Poland and Russia, the ÷ sign was sometimes used to denote a range of values, and in Scandinavian countries it was, and sometimes still is, used as a negation sign:^[5] the Unicode Consortium has allocated a separate code point, U+2052 ⁒ COMMERCIAL MINUS SIGN for this usage uniquely;^[6][7] the exact form of the symbol displayed is typeface (font) dependent.

In computer systems

Encoding

The symbol was assigned to code point 0xF7 in ISO 8859-1, as the "division sign". This encoding was transferred to Unicode as U+00F7.^[8] In HTML, it can be encoded as ÷ or ÷ (at HTML level 3.2), or as ÷.

Unicode provides various division symbols:^[9]

Codepoint	Name	Symbol
U+00F7	Division Sign	÷
U+27CC	Long Division	⟌
U+2215	Division Slash	∕
U+2A38	Circled Division Sign	⨸
U+2797	Heavy Division Sign	➗
U+2298	Circled Division Slash	⊘
U+22C7	Division Times	⋇
U+29BC	Circled Anticlockwise-Rotated Division Sign	⦼

See also

• Plus and minus signs
• Multiplication sign