The yen and yuan sign, ¥, is a

currency sign A currency symbol or currency sign is a graphic symbol used to denote a currency unit. Usually it is defined by the monetary authority, like the national central bank for the currency concerned. In formatting, the symbol can use various format ...

used for the

Japanese yen The is the official currency of Japan. It is the third-most traded currency in the foreign exchange market, after the United States dollar (US$) and the euro. It is also widely used as a third reserve currency after the US dollar and the ...

and the

Chinese yuan The renminbi (; symbol: ¥; ISO code: CNY; abbreviation: RMB) is the official currency of the People's Republic of China and one of the world's most traded currencies, ranking as the fifth most traded currency in the world as of April 202 ...

currencies A currency, "in circulation", from la, currens, -entis, literally meaning "running" or "traversing" 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 def ...

when writing in Latin scripts. This monetary symbol resembles a Latin letter Y with a single or double horizontal stroke. The symbol is usually placed before the value it represents, for example: ¥50, or JP¥50 and CN¥50 when disambiguation is needed. When writing in Japanese and Chinese, the Japanese

kanji are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese ...

and

Chinese character Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the Written Chinese, writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are k ...

is written following the amount, for example in Japan, and or in China. 9yuan

Code points

The

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

code point In character encoding terminology, a code point, codepoint or code position is a numerical value that maps to a specific character. Code points usually represent a single grapheme—usually a letter, digit, punctuation mark, or whitespace—but ...

is . Additionally, there is a full width character, , at code point for use with wide fonts, especially

East Asia East Asia is the eastern region of Asia, which is defined in both geographical and ethno-cultural terms. The modern states of East Asia include China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan. China, North Korea, South Korea and ...

n fonts. There was no code-point for this symbol in the original (7-bit) US-

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of ...

and consequently many early systems reassigned (allocated to the

backslash The backslash is a typographical mark used mainly in computing and mathematics. It is the mirror image of the common slash . It is a relatively recent mark, first documented in the 1930s. History , efforts to identify either the origin o ...

(\) in ASCII) to the yen sign. With the arrival of 8-bit encoding, the

ISO/IEC 8859-1 ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in ...

("ISO Latin 1") character set assigned code point to the ¥ in 1985; Unicode continues this encoding. In

JIS X 0201 JIS X 0201, a Japanese Industrial Standard developed in 1969 (then called JIS C 6220 until the JIS category reform), was the first Japanese electronic character set to become widely used. It is either a 7-bit encoding or an 8-bit encoding, altho ...

, of which

Shift JIS Shift JIS (Shift Japanese Industrial Standards, also SJIS, MIME name Shift_JIS, known as PCK in Solaris contexts) is a character encoding for the Japanese language, originally developed by a Japanese company called ASCII Corporation in conjunctio ...

is an extension, assigns code point to the Latin-script yen sign: as noted above, this is the code used for the

. This standard was widely adopted in Japan.

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft adopted the ISO code in

Windows-1252 Windows-1252 or CP-1252 ( code page 1252) is a single-byte character encoding of the Latin alphabet, used by default in the legacy components of Microsoft Windows for English and many European languages including Spanish, French, and German. It ...

for the Americas and Western Europe but Japanese-language locales of Microsoft operating systems use the code page 932 character encoding, which is a variant of Shift JIS. Hence, 0x5C is displayed as a yen sign in Japanese-locale fonts on Windows. It is nonetheless used wherever a backslash is used, such as the directory separator character (for example, in C:¥) and as the general

escape character In computing and telecommunication, an escape character is a character (computing), character that invokes an alternative interpretation on the following characters in a character sequence. An escape character is a particular case of metacharac ...

(¥n). It is mapped onto the Unicode U+005C REVERSE SOLIDUS (i.e. backslash), while Unicode U+00A5 YEN SIGN is given a one-way "best fit" mapping to 0x5C in code page 932, and 0x5C is displayed as a backslash in Microsoft's documentation for code page 932, essentially making it a backslash given the appearance of a yen sign by localized fonts. The

won sign The won sign , is a currency symbol. It represents the South Korean won, the North Korean won and, unofficially, the old Korean won. Appearance Its appearance is "W" (the first letter of "Won") with a horizontal strike going through the cent ...

₩ has similar issues in Korean versions of Windows.

IBM EBCDIC

IBM's

Code page 437 Code page 437 (CCSID 437) is the character set of the original IBM PC (personal computer). It is also known as CP437, OEM-US, OEM 437, PC-8, or DOS Latin US. The set includes all printable ASCII characters as well as some accented letters (diacri ...

used code point for the ¥ and this encoding was also used by several other computer systems. The ¥ is assigned code point B2 in EBCDIC 500 and many other EBCDIC code pages.

Chinese IME

Under Chinese

Pinyin Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese for ...

input method editor An input method (or input method editor, commonly abbreviated IME) is an operating system component or program that enables users to generate characters not natively available on their input devices by using sequences of characters (or mouse o ...

s (IMEs) such as those from

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

Sogou.com Sogou, Inc. () is a Chinese technology company that offers a search engine. It is a subsidiary of Tencent. The offices of Sogou are located on the southeast corner of Tsinghua University in Beijing. Sogou also has offices in Chengdu co-locate ...

, typing displays the

full-width In CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) computing, graphic characters are traditionally classed into fullwidth (in Taiwan and Hong Kong: 全形; in CJK: 全角) and halfwidth (in Taiwan and Hong Kong: 半形; in CJK: 半角) characters. Unlik ...

character , which is different from half-width used in Japanese IMEs.

円, 元, and 圆/圓

The Japanese

(yen), and

and (yuan) are used when writing in Japanese and Chinese. In

Hong Kong Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China ( abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delt ...

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the nort ...

Macau Macau or Macao (; ; ; ), officially the Macao Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (MSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China in the western Pearl River Delta by the South China Sea. With a pop ...

and

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...

, although the currency is written with a

dollar sign The dollar sign, also known as peso sign, is a symbol consisting of a capital " S" crossed with one or two vertical strokes ($ or ), used to indicate the unit of various currencies around the world, including most currencies denominated "pes ...

($) (or

HK$ The Hong Kong dollar (, sign: HK$; code: HKD) is the official currency of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. It is subdivided into 100 cents or 1000 mils. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority is the monetary authority of Hong Kong and ...

NT$ The New Taiwan dollar (code: TWD; symbol: NT$, also abbreviated as NT) is the official currency of Taiwan. The New Taiwan dollar has been the currency of Taiwan since 1949, when it replaced the Old Taiwan dollar, at a rate of 40,000 old dollars ...

, MOP$ or S$ when necessary to indicate which dollar is meant) in Latin script, it is also rendered as and / (yuan) when writing in Chinese. The name of the North Korean and

South Korean won The Korean Republic won, unofficially the South Korean won ( Symbol: ₩; Code: KRW; Korean: 대한민국 원) is the official currency of South Korea. A single won is divided into 100 jeon, the monetary subunit. The jeon is no longer used f ...

(

₩ The won sign , is a currency symbol. It represents the South Korean won, the North Korean won and, unofficially, the old Korean won. Appearance Its appearance is "W" (the first letter of "Won") with a horizontal strike going through the cent ...

) comes from the equivalent

hanja Hanja (Hangul: ; Hanja: , ), alternatively known as Hancha, are Chinese characters () used in the writing of Korean. Hanja was used as early as the Gojoseon period, the first ever Korean kingdom. (, ) refers to Sino-Korean vocabulary, wh ...

(, won).

Turkmen

In the 1993 Turkmen orthography, the Yen sign was used as the capital form of ÿ and represented the sound . It was replaced with Ý.

Notes

References

{{Currency signs Japanese yen Renminbi Currency symbols