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 ￥)[lower-alpha 1] for use with wide fonts, especially East Asian fonts.

There was no code-point for this symbol in the original (7-bit) US-ASCII and consequently many early systems reassigned 5C (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 A5 to the ¥ in 1985; Unicode continues this encoding.

In JIS X 0201, of which Shift JIS is an extension, assigns code point 0x5C to the latin-script yen sign: as noted above, this is the code used for the backslash in ASCII. This standard was widely adopted in Japan.

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft adopted the ISO code A5 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.[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

IBM's Code page 437 used code point 9D 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 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.

Notes
  1. In the block "Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms"
gollark: It looks like my entry to the maze one.
gollark: You know palaiologos can lie, right?
gollark: I have to keep rederiving it because I forgot.
gollark: My entry is #1, apparently.
gollark: It is of course a sequel to these.

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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