Currency sign (generic)

The currency sign is a character used to denote an unspecified currency. It can be described as a circle the size of a lowercase character with four short radiating arms at 45° (northeast), 135° (southeast), 225° (southwest) and 315° (northwest). It is raised slightly above the baseline. The character is sometimes called scarab. 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. and the 1986 edition (KOI8-E) of ECMA-113 have very different layouts, their repertoires are very similar, differing only in that the 1986 edition has a universal currency sign and the 1988 edition has a section sign. 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, , but this standard failed to gain significant acceptance given the dominance at the time of Microsoft's Windows-1252 code page. In the modern era, the Unicode 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.

The symbol may be seen in technical documentation, such as those for programming languages (e.g., Java's ), to represent any arbitrary currency. This invites the reader to (mentally) substitute their local symbol when reading.

Unicode

It is represented in Unicode as

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 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.

OS-specific

The currency sign was once a part of the Mac OS Roman character set, but Apple changed the symbol at that code point to the euro sign in Mac OS 8.5. In pre-Unicode Windows character sets (Windows-1252), 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

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