The currency sign is a character used to denote an unspecified

currency A currency is a standardization of money in any form, in use or circulation as a medium of exchange, for example banknotes and coins. A more general definition is that a currency is a ''system of money'' in common use within a specific envi ...

. It can be described as a circle the size of a lowercase character with four short radiating arms at 45° (NE), 135° (SE), 225° (SW) and 315° (NW). It is raised slightly above the baseline. The character is sometimes called scarab.

History

The symbol was first encoded for computers in 1972, as a placeholder for national currency symbols such as the

dollar sign The dollar sign, also known as the peso sign, is a currency symbol consisting of a Letter case, capital crossed with one or two vertical strokes ( or depending on typeface), used to indicate the unit of various currency, currencies around ...

, in national variants (

ISO 646 ISO/IEC 646 ''Information technology — ISO 7-bit coded character set for information interchange'', is an International Organization for Standardization, ISO/International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC standard in the ...

) of

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

and the International Reference Variant. It was proposed by Italy as an alternative (to the dollar sign) at 0x24. In reality, most national standards retained the dollar sign as too important. ASCII and ISO 646 were specified as 7-bit encoding, which allowed for 96 printable characters and 32 control codes. The character is used in the GSM default 7-bit encoding as specified in 3GPP TS 23.038 / GSM 03.38 at 0x24. The introduction of 8-bit encoding and the

ISO/IEC 8859 ISO/IEC 8859 is a joint International Organization for Standardization, ISO and International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC series of standards for 8-bit character encodings. The series of standards consists of numbered parts, such as ISO/IEC ...

code page In computing, a code page is a character encoding and as such it is a specific association of a set of printable character (computing), characters and control characters with unique numbers. Typically each number represents the binary value in a s ...

s meant that all major national currency symbols (in use at the time) could be accommodated. When

ISO 8859 ISO/IEC 8859 is a joint International Organization for Standardization, ISO and International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC series of standards for 8-bit character encodings. The series of standards consists of numbered parts, such as ISO/IEC ...

was standardized, this symbol was placed at

code point A code point, codepoint or code position is a particular position in a Table (database), table, where the position has been assigned a meaning. The table may be one dimensional (a column), two dimensional (like cells in a spreadsheet), three dime ...

0xA4 in the Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew character sets. The Cyrillic set included it in early drafts, but it was removed in the published version in favour of including the

section sign The section sign (§) is a typographical character for referencing individually numbered sections of a document; it is frequently used when citing sections of a legal code. It is also known as the section symbol, section mark, double-s, or si ...

, , and it was not included in all later added Latin sets. In Soviet computer systems (usually using some variant of KOI character set) this symbol was placed at the code point used by the dollar sign in ASCII. ISO Latin9 reallocated the code point used for this symbol to the

euro sign The euro sign () is the currency sign used for the euro, the official currency of the eurozone. The design was presented to the public by the European Commission on 12 December 1996. It consists of a stylized letter E (or epsilon), crossed by ...

, , but this standard failed to gain significant acceptance given the dominance at the time of Microsoft's

Windows-1252 Windows-1252 or CP-1252 ( Windows code page 1252) is a legacy single-byte character encoding that is used by default (as the "ANSI code page") in Microsoft Windows throughout the Americas, Western Europe, Oceania, and much of Africa. Initially ...

code page. In the modern era, the

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

standard gives each of the major currency symbols and this one its own unique and device-independent code point, with implementation (or lack of) left to font designers.

Other uses

The symbol is used as a non-printing "end of cell" marker for tables in

Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor program, word processing program developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platf ...

Unicode

It is represented in

Keyboard entry

The symbol is available on some keyboard layouts, for example, French, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Estonian, Slovak and Hungarian. Otherwise, it may be typed * in Windows using **

US international QWERTY ( ) is a keyboard layout for Latin-script alphabets. The name comes from the order of the first six Computer keyboard keys#Types, keys on the top letter row of the keyboard: . The QWERTY design is based on a layout included in the Sh ...

setting in Windows: (with this setting, the right-hand Alt key acts as an AltGr key) * In Linux as * In Linux and ChromeOS using ** In ChromeOS (if using US international keyboard setting) * Using in

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latices are found in nature, but synthetic latices are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a wikt:milky, milky fluid, which is present in 10% of all floweri ...

OS-specific

The currency sign was once a part of the

Mac OS Roman Mac OS Roman is a character encoding created by Apple Computer, Inc. for use by Macintosh computers. It is suitable for representing text in English and several other languages that use the Latin script. Mac OS Roman encodes 256 characters, the ...

character set, but

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

changed the symbol at that code point to the euro sign in Mac OS 8.5. In pre-Unicode

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

character sets (

), the generic currency sign was retained at 0xA4 and the euro sign was introduced as a new code point, at 0x80 in the little used (by Microsoft) control-code space 0x80 to 0x9F.

Explanatory footnotes

References

{{Currency signs Currency symbols Typographical symbols