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.

⁒
Commercial minus sign
In UnicodeU+2052 ⁒ COMMERCIAL MINUS SIGN (HTML ⁒)
Different from
Different fromU+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.

gollark: You can apparently still buy marmite rice cakes off Amazon with one-day shipping, even though there's not much food in many shops.
gollark: Not all food, just bread and pasta - carbohydratey things I guess.
gollark: Here we seem to be lacking food *and* toilet paper!
gollark: The reaction certainly doesn't *help*, though.
gollark: It's not *just* that.

See also
  • Obelus (the predecessor of this variant)

References
  1. Johann Philipp Schellenberg (1825). Kaufmännische Arithmetik (in German). p. 213.
  2. Leif Halvard Silli. "Commercial minus as italic variant of division sign in German and Scandinavian context". Unicode.org.
  3. "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
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