The yen and yuan sign ( ¥) is a currency sign used for the Japanese yen and the Renminbi currency when writing in Latin scripts. This character resembles a capital 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 or Chinese character is written following the amount, for example in Japan, and or in China.
History
Japan
After the institution of Japan's New Currency Act, from 1871 through the early 20th century, the yen was either referred to (in documents printed in
Latin script) by its full name
yen, or abbreviated with a capital "Y". One of the earliest uses of can be found in J. Twizell Wawn's "Japanese Municipal Government With an Account of the Administration of the City of Kobe",
published in 1899. Usage of the sign increased in the early 20th century, primarily in
Western world English-speaking countries, but has become commonly used in Japan as well.
Code points
The
Unicode code point is . Additionally, there is a
Full-width character, , at code point for use with wide fonts, especially
fonts.
There was no code-point for any ¥ symbol in the original (7-bit) US-ASCII and consequently many early systems reassigned (allocated to the backslash (\) in ASCII) to the yen sign. With the arrival of 8-bit encoding, the ISO/IEC 8859-1 ("ISO Latin 1") character set assigned code point to the ¥ in 1985; Unicode continues this encoding.
In JIS X 0201, of which Shift JIS is an extension, assigns code point to the Latin-script yen sign: as noted above, this is the code used for the backslash in ASCII and also subsequently in Unicode. The JIS X 0201 standard was widely adopted in Japan.
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft adopted the ISO code in Windows-1252 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 thus displayed wherever a backslash is used, such as the directory separator character (for example, in rather than ) and as the general
escape character ().
It is mapped onto the Unicode (i.e. backslash),
while Unicode 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. (Similarly in Korean versions of Windows, 0x5C was reassigned to hold the
Won sign (₩) and has similar presentation issues.)
IBM EBCDIC
IBM's Code page 437 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 input methods
Under Chinese
Pinyin input method editors (IMEs) such as those from
Microsoft or Sogou.com, typing displays the
full-width character , which is different from
Half-width kana used in Japanese IMEs.
Native characters
In
East Asia, several
CJK characters (Chinese characters, Japanese
Kanji, and Korean
Hanja) are used when writing own currencies in local languages. These characters include , , , , . In
Hong Kong,
Macau,
Singapore and
Taiwan, these characters are also used as the local language counterpart in parallel with the
dollar sign ($) (or HK$, MOP$, S$ or NT$ when necessary to indicate which currency is meant). The name of the North Korean and South Korean won (
Won sign) comes from the equivalent
hanja (, ) (, won).
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Current official currency unit of Taiwan on Taiwanese dollar banknotes and coins
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Current official currency unit of Macau on Macanese pataca banknotes and coins
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Historical official currency unit of China, Japan and Korea until late 1950s
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Historical official currency unit of Korean Empire in early 20th century
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Current official currency unit of China on Renminbi banknotes and coins
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Other uses
Turkmenistan
In the
Turkmen alphabet, the yen sign was used as the capital form of ÿ and represented the sound . It was replaced with Ý in 1999.
Germany
The yen sign strongly resembles the unit insignia of the World War II German Army's 17th Panzer Division.
Notes
