Currency (typography)

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¤ v • d • e Punctuation
apostrophe ( ’ ' ) brackets (( )), ([ ]), ({ }), (< >) colon ( : ) comma ( , ) dashes ( ‒, –, —, ― ) ellipsis ( …, ... ) exclamation mark ( ! ) full stop/period ( . ) guillemets ( « » ) hyphen ( -, ‐ ) question mark ( ? ) quotation marks ( ‘ ’, “ ” ) semicolon ( ; ) slash/stroke ( / ) solidus ( ⁄ )
Interword separation
spaces ( ) ( ) ( ) interpunct ( · )
General typography
ampersand ( & ) asterisk ( * ) at ( @ ) backslash ( \ ) bullet ( • ) caret ( ^ ) currency ( ¤ ) ¢, $, €, £, ¥, ₩, ₪ dagger/obelisk ( † ) ( ‡ ) degree ( ° ) inverted exclamation point ( ¡ ) inverted question mark ( ¿ ) number sign ( # ) numero sign ( № ) percent and related signs ( %, ‰, ‱ ) pilcrow ( ¶ ) prime ( ′ ) section sign ( § ) tilde/swung dash ( ~ ) umlaut/diaeresis ( ¨ ) underscore/understrike ( _ ) vertical/pipe/broken bar ( |, ¦ )
Uncommon typography
asterism ( ⁂ ) index/fist ( ☞ ) therefore sign ( ∴ ) interrobang ( ‽ ) irony mark ( ؟ ) reference mark ( ※ ) sarcasm mark

The currency sign (¤) is a character used to denote a currency when the symbol for a particular currency is unavailable. It is particularly common in place of symbols such as that of the Colón (₡), which are absent from most character sets and fonts. It can be described as a circle the size of a lowercase character with four short radiating arms at 1:30, 4:30, 7:30, and 10:30.

It is represented in Unicode as CURRENCY SIGN (U+00A4). In HTML, the character entity reference ¤ or numeric character reference ¤ may be used.

The currency sign used to be a part of the Mac OS Roman character set, but the symbol at that code point was changed to the euro sign (€) in Mac OS 8.5.

The symbol is available on some keyboard layouts, for example French, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish keyboards. On US International keyboard layouts, it is obtained by AltGr + 4.

[edit] History

The symbol was invented in 1972 as a replacement for the dollar sign in national variants of ISO 646, and, originally, also the International Reference Variant.[1] It was proposed by Italy[2] to allow an alternative to encoding the dollar sign. When ISO 8859 was standardized, it was placed at 0xA4 in the Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew character sets. There was not room for it in the Cyrillic set, and it was not included in all later added Latin sets. Latin 9 in particular replaces it with the Euro sign.

[edit] Other usages

• Alternative separator in CSV files
• Delete sign when typing on paper for later OCR processing
  • ¤ : delete previous character
  • ¤¤ : delete previous word (i.e. back to previous space character)
  • ¤¤¤ : delete entire line
• In Microsoft Word, ¤ is used to indicate the end of a table cell in some viewing modes

da:Generisk valutategn

de:Allgemeines Währungssymbol it:¤ nl:¤ sv:¤