Search results for 'tag:American English tag:Underline' matching tags 'American English' and 'Underline'

Re: underline - Different words? Any rules?

Kooyeen — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 23:42:53 GMT

Hi spinnaker,
if you are asking about the ASCII symbol, then it should be "underscore" ---> _
But when you see a word like this ---> word ----> that word is "underlined" (maybe also "underscored" in American English, but I think the usual word is still "underlined")

Maybe the native speakers will tell us more...

Re: underline - Different words? Any rules?

Doll — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 20:35:19 GMT

Underline and underscore both means emphasizing but underscore is used in American English.The third word may be highlight.They seemed to me interchangable but lets wait for a native speaker answer.You know in English some words are used differently though they have the same meaning

Re: underline/underscore (American English)

Goodman — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 23:26:47 GMT

Slam_54 @ yahoo - this dash is [ underscore]

Slam54@yahoo - this is [underline]

Re: underline/underscore (American English)

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 20:48:39 GMT

We want to say:

Underline

Under_score

It's so simple as well!

Re: underline/underscore (American English)

CalifJim — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 17:13:18 GMT

I'm just wondering now whether we could use a distinction between underline and underscore

I think we could indeed.
(But you all knew that already from my previous posts! )

Re: underline/underscore (American English)

davkett — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 13:35:23 GMT

CalifJim wrote:
Gosh! There's been a lot of activity on this thread since I visited last.

I'm just wondering now whether we could use a distinction between underline and underscore-- a distinction that has not yet made its way into dictionaries --and a symbol for each, i.e., underline: "U", a line drawn under a single word or phrase of text; underscore: "_" , a line drawn under the single space between units of text.

Shall we vote?

Re: underline/underscore (American English)

CalifJim — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 05:22:58 GMT

Gosh! There's been a lot of activity on this thread since I visited last.
My answer was simply an answer to the original poster, who asked what Americans called the symbol "_". Since I work in data processing in the U.S. and have seen that symbol daily for many years, I felt I could easily answer -- at least what all the people I know in data processing say all the time: "underscore". It is used primarily as a connective symbol, thus: purchase_order_amount. It serves two purposes: It allows an entire string of symbols, unbroken by any spaces -- as required by most computer languages, to be used to represent a certain entity, and it allows the human reader to read it easily. (It's easier to read than purchordamt, for example, which represents an older style of coding.) Long story short, if you ask a programmer to read the variable name task_hours over the phone, he or she will say, "T, A, S, K, underscore, H, O, U, R, S".

Underlines, in this sort of work, are not individual characters like the underscore is. They are a format applied to a string of characters in a given font. Working in that context, is an underlined space, rarely seen in isolation, of course. The way many fonts work, it may be impossible to see an underlined underscore, but internally, it is represented by the code for the underscore accompanied by the code which designates that the underscore symbol occurs underlined!

as_in_this_grouping Yes, I typed underscores between those words, then applied underlining! Can you tell? Surprisingly to me, it does show as two different elements on my screen.

CJ

Re: underline/underscore (American English)

davkett — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 04:52:49 GMT

MrPedantic wrote:

Well, you can use underlining on e.g. a typewriter

That's it! I was thinking of the "_" key on a typewriter (from ancient times), not on a keyboard. So back to my earlier post in which I'm perplexed about where the disagreement stands on the question of the symbol.

I don't consider this question resolved yet.

Re: underline/underscore (American English)

MrPedantic — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 02:34:22 GMT

Well, you can use underlining on e.g. a typewriter, or in handwritten texts, in place of italics (in scientific names, etc). And MS seems to have picked up on this, as any Word text surrounded by underscores is autocorrected to italics (if AutoCorrect is "on").

I think underscores are also used for italics in .txt files sometimes.

MrP

Re: underline/underscore (American English)

davkett — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 02:22:16 GMT

MrPedantic wrote:

I don't think you can use the keyboard symbol _ to underline anything, can you? (In fact, it seems more usual to use it for creating italics.)

MrP

You're right. I don't know what I was thinking.

How do you use it for italics?