| ¥ | |
|---|---|
yen and yuan sign | |
| In Unicode | U+00A5 ¥YEN SIGN (¥) |
| Currency | |
| Currency | Japanese yen andChinese yuan |
| Graphical variants | |
| ￥ | |
| U+FFE5 ￥FULLWIDTH YEN SIGN | |
| Related | |
| See also | U+5143 元CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-5143 (Yuan) U+5186 円CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-5186 (Yen) |
| Different from | |
| Different from | U+04B0 ҰCYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER STRAIGHT U WITH STROKE |
 Category | |
Theyen and yuan sign (¥) is acurrency sign used for theJapanese yen and theChinese yuancurrencies when writing in Latin scripts. This character resembles a capital letterY with a single or double horizontal stroke. The symbol is usually placed before the value it represents, for example: ¥50, or JP¥50 and CN¥50 when disambiguation is needed.[a] When writing in Japanese and Chinese, the Japanesekanji andChinese character is written following the amount, for example50円 in Japan, and50元 or50圆 in China.
After the institution of Japan'sNew Currency Act, from 1871 through the early 20th century, the yen was either referred to (in documents printed inLatin script) by its full nameyen, or abbreviated with a capital "Y".[citation needed] One of the earliest uses of¥ can be found in J. Twizell Wawn's "Japanese Municipal Government With an Account of the Administration of the City of Kobe",[1] published in 1899. Usage of the sign increased in the early 20th century, primarily inWestern English-speaking countries, but has become commonly used in Japan as well.
TheUnicodecode point isU+00A5 ¥YEN SIGN (¥). Additionally, there is afull width character,￥, at code pointU+FFE5 ￥FULLWIDTH YEN SIGN[b] for use with wide fonts, especiallyEast Asian fonts.
There was no code-point for any ¥ symbol in the original (7-bit) US-ASCII and consequently many early systems reassigned5C (allocated to thebackslash (\) in ASCII) to the yen sign. With the arrival of 8-bit encoding, theISO/IEC 8859-1 ("ISO Latin 1") character set assigned code pointA5 to the ¥ in 1985; Unicode continues this encoding.
InJIS X 0201, of whichShift JIS is an extension, assigns code point0x5C to the Latin-script yen sign: as noted above, this is the code used for thebackslash inASCII and also subsequently in Unicode. The JIS X 0201 standard was widely adopted in Japan.
Microsoft adopted the ISO codeA5 inWindows-1252 for the Americas and Western Europe but Japanese-language locales of Microsoft operating systems use thecode 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 thus displayed wherever a backslash is used, such as thedirectory separator character (for example, inC:¥ rather thanC:\) and as the generalescape character (¥n).[2] It is mapped onto the UnicodeU+005C \REVERSE SOLIDUS (i.e. backslash),[3] while UnicodeU+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. (Similarly in Korean versions of Windows, 0x5C was reassigned to hold theWon sign (₩) and has similar presentation issues.)
IBM'sCode page 437 used code point9D 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.
Under ChinesePinyininput method editors (IMEs) such as those fromMicrosoft orSogou.com, typing$ displays thefull-width character￥, which is different fromhalf-width¥ used in Japanese IMEs.
InEast Asia, severalCJK characters (Chinese characters, JapaneseKanji, and KoreanHanja) are used when writing own currencies in local languages. These characters include円,元,圆,圓,圜. InHong Kong,Macau,Singapore andTaiwan, these characters are also used as the local language counterpart in parallel with thedollar sign ($) (orHK$,MOP$,S$ orNT$ when necessary to indicate which currency is meant). The name of theNorth Korean andSouth Korean won (₩) comes from the equivalenthanja (圓,圜) (원, won).
| Character | Type | Use |
|---|---|---|
| 圓 | Traditional Chinese characters JapaneseKyūjitai, and KoreanHanja |
|
| 圜 | A variant of KoreanHanja |
|
| 圆 | Simplified Chinese characters |
|
| 円 | JapaneseShinjitai |
|
| 元 | A variant ofChinese characters |
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In the1993 Turkmen orthography, the yen sign was used as the capital form ofÿ and represented the sound/j/. It was replaced with Ý in 1999.
The yen sign strongly resembles the unit insignia of the World War II German Army's17th Panzer Division.
Fines of not more than one yen and ninety-five sen (¥1.95) may be levied for infractions of city by-laws.
