Yen sign

¥ ￥
yen, yuan

The yen sign (¥) or the yuan sign (¥/元) is a currency sign used by the Japanese yen (JPY) and the Chinese yuan (CNY) currencies. This monetary symbol resembles a Latin letter Y with a single or double horizontal stroke.

The base unit of both currencies shared the same Chinese character/Kanji (traditional Chinese: 圓; simplified Chinese: 圆; Japanese Kyūjitai: 圓; Japanese Shinjitai: 円) that means "circle". It is pronounced yuán in Chinese and en in Japanese. In mainland of China, the Chinese character is more frequently written in everyday situations using the simpler character 元, which has the same pronunciation as the formal financial character 圓 in Standard Chinese[1] (but not in Japanese and in some Chinese varieties).[lower-alpha 1] The symbol is usually placed before the value it represents, for example RMB￥20 in China, and JP¥1500 in Japan. However it is also more commonly represented as 20元 in China and 1500円 in Japan.

¥9 An example of a price sticker from China

Code points

The Unicode code point is U+00A5 ¥ YEN SIGN (HTML ¥ · ¥). Additionally, there is a full width character (￥) at code point U+FFE5 ￥ FULLWIDTH YEN SIGN (HTML ￥ · In the block "Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms") for use with wide fonts, especially East Asian fonts.

The Latin 1 character set assigned code point A5 to the ¥ in 1985. This was quickly adopted by many computer systems which used either the ISO/IEC 8859-1 or Windows-1252 encodings. IBM Code page 437 used code point 9D for the ¥ and this encoding was also used by several other computer systems.

In JIS X 0201, of which Shift JIS is an extension, the yen sign has the same byte value (0x5C) as the backslash in ASCII. This standard was widely adopted.

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.[2] 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 (¥n).[2] It is mapped onto the Unicode U+005C REVERSE SOLIDUS (i.e. backslash),[3] while Unicode U+00A5 YEN SIGN is given a one-way "best fit" mapping to 0x5C in code page 932,[2] and 0x5C is displayed as a backslash in Microsoft's documentation for code page 932,[4] essentially making it a backslash given the appearance of a yen sign by localized fonts.

The ¥ is assigned code point B2 in EBCDIC 500 and many other EBCDIC code pages.

Chinese IME

Under Chinese Pinyin IMEs such as those from Microsoft or Sogou.com, typing "$" displays the full-width character "￥", which is different from half-width "¥" used in Japanese IMEs.

Notes

  1. ↑ Such as dialects of Wu, Min Nan, Hakka and Vietnamese, see the entries for the characters 圓 and 元 in Wiktionary.

References

  1. ↑ Basic accounting rules, People's Bank of China
    第二十六条 凭证、账簿的各种代用符号为：人民币“元”符号为“￥” – Article 26 receipt, the symbol of Yuan is ￥.(in Chinese)
  2. 1 2 3 Kaplan, Michael S. (2005-09-17). "When is a backslash not a backslash?".
  3. ↑ "CP932.TXT". Unicode Consortium.
  4. ↑ "Lead byte NULL — Code page 932". Microsoft.
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