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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 45° (NE), 135° (NW), 225°, (SW) and 315° (SE), and slightly raised over the baseline.
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 Apple changed the symbol at that code point to the euro sign (€) in Mac OS 8.5. In non-Unicode Windows character sets, the euro sign was introduced as a new code-point. In the Unicode character-sets of Mac OS, Windows, and Unix, the two symbols each have unique code points.
The symbol is available on some keyboard layouts, for example French, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish/Finnish keyboards, because it is usedcitation needed in business applications.
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History
The symbol was invented in 1972 as a replacement for the dollar sign in national variants (ISO 646) of ASCII, and, originally, also the International Reference Variant.1 It was proposed by Italy2 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.
Context dependent meaning
This character plays the role of the SUB (substitute) control character of ASCII, but is specific to currency.
Thus, even when it is appropriately used, it has an inherent ambiguous meaning: ¤12.50 can be interpreted as 12.5 units of some currency, but the currency itself is unknown, and can only be determined by information outside the use of the character in itself.
More likely, this sign was intended to mark the position of the national currency symbol into the national variants of ASCII (7-bit, 95 printable characters available), where a specific national body were reluctant to accept the dollar sign $ as a kind of "universal sign" to denote "currency" or "money". The currency sign ¤ should be replaced then by the appropriate glyph, depending on audience: ƒ, ₤, ₧, ¥, etc. But somehow, the neutral currency sign ¤ came to be used as a printable symbol in itself, and this usage were sufficient extended in the years of the first drafts of ISO 8859 to include it.citations needed
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.
- On the Xbox 360, ¤ becomes the Microsoft Points symbol when entered.
- In some versions of BASIC (notably in Soviet versions and ABC BASIC), ¤ was used for string variables instead of $. It was located on the keyboard at the same position as $ is now.
References
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Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 16 August 2008, at 01:59.
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