Yen sign

The yen or yuan sign, ¥) is a currency sign used for the Japanese yen and the Chinese yuan currencies when writing in Western 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, unlike the kanji/Chinese character, which is more commonly used in Japanese and Chinese and is written following the amount: 50円 in Japan and 50元 in China.

An example of a price sticker from China
¥
yen, yuan sign
In UnicodeU+00A5 ¥ YEN SIGN (HTML ¥ · ¥)
Currency
CurrencyJapanese yen, Chinese yuan
Graphical variants
￥
U+FFE5 ￥ FULLWIDTH YEN SIGN
Category

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 (pre-Unicode) 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 latin yen sign has the same code point (binary value), 0x5C, as has the backslash in ASCII. This standard was widely adopted.

Microsoft Windows

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.[1] 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).[1] It is mapped onto the Unicode U+005C REVERSE SOLIDUS (i.e. backslash),[2] while Unicode U+00A5 YEN SIGN is given a one-way "best fit" mapping to 0x5C in code page 932,[1] and 0x5C is displayed as a backslash in Microsoft's documentation for code page 932,[3] essentially making it a backslash given the appearance of a yen sign by localized fonts. The won sign has similar issues in Korean versions of Windows.

IBM EBCDIC

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

Chinese IME

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 ¥ used in Japanese IMEs.

円 and 元

The Japanese kanji 円 (yen) and Chinese character 元 (yuan) are more commonly used when writing in Japanese and Chinese.


References
  1. Kaplan, Michael S. (2005-09-17). "When is a backslash not a backslash?".
  2. "CP932.TXT". Unicode Consortium.
  3. "Lead byte NULL — Code page 932". Microsoft.
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