Manual: Currency Symbols

1.	General rules
2.	Currency sign
3.	Armenian Dram
4.	Azerbaijan Manat
5.	Bangladeshi Taka
6.	Bitcoin
7.	Cent
8.	Dollar
9.	Euro
10.	Florin
11.	Georgian Lari
12.	Hryvnia
13.	Israeli Shekel
14.	Kazakhstani Tenge
15.	Mongolian Tugrik
16.	Pound
17.	Russian Ruble
18.	Rupee and Rupiah
19.	Thai Baht
20.	Won
21.	Yen and Yuan

General rules

The currency of each country has an internationally accepted abbreviation (ISO), an alphabetic code that most often indicates the country it’s being used in and the name of the currency itself. However, not all currencies are represented by a special symbol.

Abbreviations are mainly used in financial documents, instruments, or language switches — most often to avoid confusion in cases where currencies from different countries have the same name (for example, Canadian and Hong Kong dollars). In such tools and interfaces, abbreviations are most often placed after the number.

Crypto wallet interface. Design: Niqoxh

You can’t combine the amount with an abbreviation from the international measurement system — for instance, it is not advisable to replace the three last zeroes with the letter k indicating a thousand or the six lax zeroes with the letter M, which stands for the million. If you intend to discard the zeros, you should write out the words ‘thousand’, ‘million’, and ‘billion’ as well as the currency’s name.

According to the current convention, amounts of money — in news stories, scientific papers, and fiction — are to be written with figures rather than written out.

Cover of the first edition of the 99 Francs book, 2000. Design: Studio des Éditions Grasset

It is appropriate to use well-known abbreviations for internationally recognised and used currencies ($ for the dollar, € for the euro) in financial and economic publications as well as other kinds of specialised literature that implies financial calculations. Arkady Milchin, Lyudmila Cheltzova Publisher and Author’s Handbook

Currency symbols typically go together with the lining (uppercase) figures by default. Tabular currency symbols are also often included in a font for them to be used, say, in interfaces of online stores. Lowercase currency signs or small caps currency signs are less likely to be seen in a font, but that also happens, and the font rarely contains currency symbols that can be combined with superscripts. If there is no such set of currency signs in a font you chose, you should not deliberately reduce the lining symbols in size using the superscript button in graphic editor software as it will make them look considerably lighter than the figures.

Fonts with tabular figures should have monetary symbols that are tabular so when they are used for monetary amounts in columns or spreadsheets the data will align. Microsoft Learn «Character Design Standards»

Fragment of the «The Colophon» magazine issues index page, 1935

¥ $ £ have fullwidth characters in Unicode. Today those are used in texts set in CJK languages with square-shaped hieroglyphs. However, the need for those characters came about in the late 1960s — the symbols were necessary for coding in CJK languages on computers that had just arrived. In early encodings, the symbols by default took up two bytes, while Latin characters took up one byte. For the proper text display, wider variations of Latin characters and currency symbols were needed.

Command line in Windows XP with Korean localisation. Image: Wikipedia

Currency symbols are found in various Unicode sections. Most of them — for example, €, ₸ ₴ ₾ ₼ ₿ — sit in the special Currency Symbols block. That said, the dollar sign is encoded in the Basic Latin block, the florin sign — in Extended Latin, the cent sign and the pound sign — in Latin-1 Supplement. The Armenian dram sign is available in the same section that contains characters for writing the Armenian language and therefore is rarely found in fonts that don’t support it.

The Underware studio suggests including six following currency symbols in a font that supports extended Latin: $ (dollar, peso), £ (pound sterling), € (euro), f (florin), ¥ (yen), ¢ (cent). In this piece, we will address these symbols and some other currency signs available in the typefaces from our library.

Currency sign

The Unicode contains a generic currency sign used to denote an unspecified currency, ¤ (U+00A4). It was introduced to be used when a currency has no graphic representation at all or when this symbol is not available in a particular font.

This character is a legacy throwback to various kinds of more-or-less manual typesetting in which it was fairly common for fonts not to include a wide variety of currency symbols, so this symbol would be inserted as a placeholder during typesetting, and then later replaced with the appropriate currency symbol sources from another font or from a special set of currency sorts. John Hudson TypeDrawers

Armenian Dram (AMD)

The Armenian dram sign (֏) is an uppercase letter Դ [d] crossed out by two horizontal bars. The word dram (Դրամ), which means both currency and money in a broader sense, starts with this letter. The dram sign is written following the amount and spaced using a non-breaking space.

Dram symbol
(regardless of keyboard layout)

Mac: Character Viewer (Control + Command + Space) → Dram
Windows: Alt + 1423 (on numpad)
HTML: &#х58f;

Armenian stamps, 2016. Image: Wopa-plus

Azerbaijani Manat (AZM)

The manat symbol, ₼, is a stylised Latin m resembling a half circle crossed out by a vertical or diagonal stroke, depending on the typeface.

Manat symbol
(regardless of keyboard layout)

Mac: Character Viewer (Control + Command + Space) → Manat
Windows: Alt + 8360 (on numpad)
HTML: &#х20bc;

Azerbaijani stamps, 2021. Image: Ebay

Azerbaijani Manat with the Manat sign on the background

Bangladeshi Taka (BDT)

The Taka sign, ৳, which is the first letter of the name of the currency (টাকা), is also used to denote the Indian rupee in texts written in Bengali. That is why the symbol is also called the Bengali rupee sign. The symbol is either not spaced from the amount or spaced with a non-breaking space. ৳ is included in the Bengali block of Unicode and is generally only available in fonts that support this script.

Taka symbol

Mac (Bijoy keyboard): Right Option + 4
Windows: Alt + 2547 (on numpad, regardless of keyboard layout)
HTML: &#х9f3;

Bangladeshi stamp, 1999. Image: Ebay

Bitcoin

The bitcoin sign is an uppercase letter B with two vertical strokes going through it which are only visible above the upper bowl and below the lower bowl. It is the only cryptocurrency symbol added to the Unicode, yet there is no internationally adopted and recognised alphabetic code for this currency. However, the abbreviations XBT and BTC are commonly found online.

Bitcoin symbol
(regardless of keyboard layout)

Mac: Character Viewer (Control + Command + Space) → Bitcoin
Windows: Alt + 8383 (on numpad)
HTML: ₿

Bitcoin in the identity of Mercuryo payment service. Set in Karloff. Image: Mercuryo. Design: Shuka

According to the Proposal for the addition of the bitcoin sign to Unicode, in Russian, Chinese, German, and Croatian languages, the sign is written following the amount and is not spaced from it. In Indonesian and Greek, the symbol also follows the amount but is separated from it using a non-breaking space. The sign has to precede the numerical value in Spanish, Portuguese, and English.

Cents

The ¢ sign normally looks like a lowercase letter c crossed by a diagonal or vertical stroke (occasionally two strokes). Sometimes the symbol is used to represent the Ghanaian cedi, the Costa Rican colón, and the Salvadoran colón — their signs are quite similar to the cent sign, but the cedi and colón signs are based on a capital letter C, not on a lowercase one. Convention dictates to place the cent sign after the amount — for example, 10¢. There is no international abbreviation for the cent.

The cent sign is now barely used due to inflation — there are almost no things left that you can purchase for a few cents. If anything indeed happens to be cheaper than one dollar or one euro, it is common to use tenths or hundredths to indicate the price, like this — $0.99, €0.99.

Cent symbol
(regardless of keyboard layout)

Mac: MacOS Character Viewer (Control + Command + Space) → Cent
Windows: Alt + 0162 (on numpad)
HTML: &cеnt;

One cedi banknote

The cent sign (¢), now an American typographical heirloom, is equally irrelevant for most work. It remains in the character set chiefly out of nostalgia. Robert Bringhurst The Elements of Typographic Style

Cent sign in the You can’t do that brochure, 1938. Image: Archive.org

Cent sign in The Barrels cafe menu, 1930-e. Image: Vintage Menu Art

Most designs are made from the lowercase c and align with the lowercase overshoots top and bottom or visually center on the figure height. These two alignments are equally common. Microsoft Learn «Character Design Standards»

Dollar

The dollar sign is a variation of the capital letter S crossed with one or two parallel vertical strokes. Dollar is the name of a number of currencies used in the US, Canada, New Zealand, and, for example, Qatar. All these currencies have different alphabetic codes and are valued differently, meaning they are worth different amounts. $ is also used to represent other currencies such as the peso (except for the Philippine peso) and the escudo. In English, the dollar sign should precede the amount, while in most European languages it is vice versa.

Dollar symbol
(English keyboard layout)

Mac: Shift + 4
Windows: Shift + 4
HTML: &dоllar;

Since many countries use symbols like $ or £ for their national currencies, it is best to provide clarifications in context. For example, using formats such as Can$50 or CND$50 for Canadian dollars, and Mex$50 for Mexican pesos to avoid confusion regarding the currency being referenced. James Felici The Complete Manual of Typography

002 Dollar sign in the Deberny et Peignot catalogue, 1926. Image: Production Type

003 Dollar sign in lettering piece by John Downer, 2012. Image: Daily Type

Euro (EUR)

According to the Eurocommision, ‘the € is inspired by the Greek epsilon ε pointing back to the cradle of European civilisation and the first letter of Europe, crossed by two parallel lines to indicate the stability of the euro’. The Eurocommision’s website features guidelines on how to draw the euro sign, but one doesn’t need to follow them — for most typefaces, a sign designed following this guide will be too wide.

In English, Dutch, and Irish, the euro sign precedes the numeric value and is not spaced from it. In German, Finnish, Bulgarian, and French, the euro sign sits after the amount and is separated from it by a non-breaking space.

Euro symbol
(English keyboard layout)

Mac: Shift + Option + 3
Windows: Alt + Option + 3
HTML: &eurо;

Euro sign official design specifications

Euro banknote

The European Commission tried to impose this symbol not as a concept to be adapted to the style of each typography but as a fixed-form pictogram without variations in style or weight. This was a clear violation of typographic conventions. Bruno Bernard (Café Typô) History of currency symbols

A poster from El Diezmo series. Image: Fonts In Use. Design: Lolo López

Tommy Cash ¥€$ music tour poster. Design: Kristina Kulikova

Florin

The florin (also called guilder) is a currency that is nowadays used only in Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten, self-governing constituent countries within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It is denoted using the lowercase letter f with a descender (Latin small letter f with hook, U+0192) or the abbreviation fl.

Florin symbol
(regardless of keyboard layout)

Mac: MacOS Character Viewer (Control + Command + Space) → Florin
Windows: Alt + 402 (on numpad)
HTML: &fnоf;;

Train tieckets from the Netherlands, 1975–1978. Image: Maurits van den Toorn

There have been several proposals submitted to Unicode to assign codes to the letter ƒ and the florin sign, but none of them have been accepted. Today the letter ƒ is used only in the Ewe language, spoken in Ghana, Togo, and Benin.

Georgian Lari (GEL)

The lari sign (₾) is a symbol based on the Georgian letter ლ (l) crossed by two vertical lines in its upper part. According to the proposal submitted by the National Bank of Georgia to Unicode in 2014, ‘it is crucial not to consolidate two vertical lines into one’. The lari sign normally sits after the amount and is spaced from it by a non-breaking space.

Lari symbol
(regardless of keyboard layout)

Mac: Character Viewer (Control + Command + Space) → Lari
Windows: Alt + 8382 (on numpad)
HTML: &#х20be;

From the lari symbol implementation manual

Lowercase lari sign under a magnifying glass. Image: Akaki Razmadze

Lari sign official design specifications

Hryvnia (UAH)

The hryvnia sign, ₴, is a handwritten version of the lowercase Cyrillic letter г crossed with a double horizontal bar. Sometimes the sign is constructed without the letter’s segment between two horizontal strokes, but all the images submitted along with the proposal to add the symbol to Unicode do feature this segment.

According to the National Bank of Ukraine, the hryvnia sign can only be abbreviated as грн (or hrn), with the abbreviations гр (hr), грвн (hrvn), and грв (hrv) being considered an error.

Hryvnia symbol
(Ukrainian keyboard layout)

Mac: Shift + Option + Ф
Windows: Shift + ~
HTML: &#хe3f;

Israeli Shekel (ILS)

The shekel sign ₪ is a monogram combining two Hebrew letters, ש [sh] and ח [kh]. It is an acronym for the full name of the currency, ‘the new shekel’ (שקל חדש). This currency is also known by the acronym NIS (New Israeli Sheqel), yet this abbreviation is not internationally accepted. In a text written in Hebrew, the shekel sign has to be placed before the amount. The symbol is either not separated from the numeric value, or is spaced using a non-breaking space.

Shekel symbol
(regardless of keyboard layout)

Mac: Character Viewer (Control + Command + Space) → Shekel
Windows: Alt + 8362 (on numpad)
HTML: &#х20aa;

100 Price tag with a Shekel sign. Image: Evan Bench

Shekels in Virgin Wood Type typefaces. Design: James Grieshaber

Kazakhstani Tenge (KZT)

The ₸ symbol is a capital letter T with a parallel horizontal line above its bar. The height of the sign is equal to the cap height. The ₸ sits after the amount and is not spaced from it.

The symbol is not to be confused with the Japanese postal mark (〒) or the character for Box Drawings Down Single and Horizontal Double (╤), which are also introduced in Unicode.

Tenge symbol
(regardless of keyboard layout)

Mac: Character Viewer (Control + Command + Space) → Tenge
Windows: Alt + 8376 (on numpad)
HTML: &#х20b8;

Kazakhstani stamps, 2024. Image: Kazpost

Tenge sign official design specifications

Mongolian Tugrik (MNT)

The tugrik sign, ₮, is a capital letter T crossed with two parallel oblique lines. The lines are normally thinner than the stem. The symbol is sometimes used to represent the Tether cryptocurrency, but it actually only resembles its sign — in the Tether logo, the letter T is crossed by a circle.

Tugrik symbol
(regardless of keyboard layout)

Mac: Character Viewer (Control + Command + Space) → Tugrik
Windows: Alt + 8366 (on numpad)
HTML: &#х20ae;

Mongolian stamp, 2020. Image: PostBeeld

Pound

The pound sign (£) is a variation of a handwritten capital letter L with the addition of a horizontal bar. The pound sign typically sits before the numerals, yet it is common to see the symbol following the amount in some texts written in Romance languages.

Pound symbol
(English keyboard layout)

Mac: Shift + Option + 2
Windows: Shift + Alt + 2
HTML: &pоund;

Pound sign in Thorowgood specimen, 1825. Image: James Puckett

Lira and pound signs in the Deberny et Peignot catalogue, 1926. Image: Production Type

The £ sign is used to represent numerous currencies, such as the Gibraltar pound, the Sudanese pound, and the Falkland pound. Previously, the pound sign was also used for the French livre and the Turkish lira, with the latter being assigned its own symbol in 2012 (₺). The special lira sign ₤, which has one horizontal stroke more than the pound sign does, was barely used.

A price tag at the market with the lira sign. Image: Unicode

Russian Ruble (RUB)

The ruble sign is a capital Cyrillic letter Р with an additional horizontal stroke. The bar is to be placed below the bowl so that the symbol doesn’t look like a Philippine peso (₱). The ₽ is written following the amount and separated from it by a non-breaking space.

Ruble symbol
(Russian keyboard layout)

Mac: Option + R
Windows: Ctrl + Alt + R
HTML: &#х20bd;

Ruble sign official design specifications

Rupee and Rupiah

The rupee is the common name for a number of currencies used in India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, for example, while the rupiah is the national currency of Indonesia. The ₹ sign or the Rs ligature are used to denote the Indian rupee. In Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, only the Rs ligature is common. The Rp ligature is used to indicate the Indonesian rupiah. Sometimes the rupee is also represented as Re or R, but these abbreviations are not described in Unicode.

The Indian rupee sign and Rp ligature precede the amount, while the Rp and Rs ligatures are written following it. Since the Rp and Rs also serve as official abbreviations for the name of the currency, the ligature can sometimes be followed by a period.

Rupee symbol
(regardless of keyboard layout)

Mac: MacOS Character Viewer (Control + Command + Space) → Rupee
Windows: Alt + 8377 (on numpad)
HTML: &#х20b9;

Indonesian stamp, 1968. Image: Elusive Muse

Rupee sign on a pill pack. Image: Rupsahu

200 Indian Rupees

Thai Baht (THB)

The baht sign, ฿, is a capital letter B crossed out by one vertical stroke. This symbol is rarely available in typefaces that don’t support the Thai script and is barely used in Thailand.

The baht sign is often mistakenly used to denote bitcoin.

Baht symbol
(regardless of keyboard layout)

Mac: Character Viewer (Control + Command + Space) → Bath
Windows: Alt + 3647 (on numpad)
HTML: &#хe3f;

Won

The won sign, ₩, is a capital Latin W crossed out by one or two horizontal bars. This sign is used to represent the South Korean won (KRW) and, less commonly, the North Korean won (KPW). The latter is most often indicated using the 원 character. The abbreviation Wn is also used to indicate the South Korean won.

Won symbol
(regardless of keyboard layout)

Mac: Character Viewer (Control + Command + Space) → Won
Windows: Alt + 8361 (on numpad)
HTML: &#х20a9;

South Korean stamp, 1949. Image: Ebay

North Korean stamp, 1961. Image: Karen Horton

Yen (JPY) and Yuan (CNY)

The ¥ sign, the letter Y with a single or double horizontal stroke going through it, is used to represent the national currencies of Japan and China, yen and yuan respectively. The two currencies had been indicated using the same graphic representation even before the internationally adopted character arrived — with the 圓 hieroglyph. The glyph variant with one stroke is now less common than the one with a double stroke, although the 1976 ISO 1073-1 standard specified a single-crossbar form.

Yen and Yuan symbol
(English keyboard layout)

Mac: Option + Y
Windows: Alt + Y
HTML: &yеn;

Price tag from Asakura book store, 1920s. Image: Seven Roads

Yakiniku restaurant menu. Image: Japan Journeys

Price tag in a computer store in Tokyo, 2024

Chinese stamp, 1963. Image: Meshok