Commercial minus sign
The commercial minus sign is a typographical and mathematical symbol used in commercial and financial documents in some European languages, in specific contexts.
⁒ | |
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Commercial minus sign | |
In Unicode | U+2052 ⁒ COMMERCIAL MINUS SIGN (HTML ⁒ ) |
Different from | |
Different from | U+0025 % PERCENT SIGN U+00F7 ÷ DIVISION SIGN |
In some commercial and financial documents, especially in Germany and Scandinavia, the commercial minus sign is used to signify a negative remainder of a division operation.[1][2] The symbol is also used in the margins of letters to indicate an enclosure, where the upper point is sometimes replaced with the corresponding number.[3]
The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet uses commercial minus signs to denote borrowed forms of a sound.[3]
In Finland, it is used as a symbol for a correct response (the check mark indicates an incorrect response).[2]
Typographic variant
In Germany, the form ./. may be seen informally as a convenient alternative to the formal glyph, since this may be typed directly from the keyboard without recourse to unicode input.
See also
- Obelus (the predecessor of this variant)
References
- Johann Philipp Schellenberg (1825). Kaufmännische Arithmetik (in German). p. 213.
- Leif Halvard Silli. "Commercial minus as italic variant of division sign in German and Scandinavian context". Unicode.org.
- "Writing Systems and Punctuation". The Unicode® Standard, Version 10.0 (PDF). Mountain View, CA: The Unicode Consortium. 2017. ISBN 978-1-936213-16-0.
See also
- Obelus (predecessor of this sign)
- Division sign (÷)
- Plus and minus signs (+, −)
- Percent sign (%)