The slash (as the "shilling mark" or "solidus") was the currency sign of the shilling, a former coin of the United Kingdom and its former colonies. Before the decimalization of currency in Britain, its currency symbols (collectively £sd) represented their Latin names, derived from a medieval French modification of the late Roman libra, solidus, and denarius. Thus, one penny less than two pounds was written During the period when English orthography included the long s, , the ſ came to be written as a single slash. When the d. fell out of general use, one penny less than two pounds was written Similarly, "2/6" meant two shillings sixpence. In Britain, exactly five shillings was typically written "5∕-" while, in East Africa, it was more common to mark it with a double hyphen as "5/=". The same style was also used under the British Raj and early independent India for the predecimalization rupee/anna/pie system.