How to type Currency Sign
To type Currency Sign (¤), press Alt + 0164 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or press Option + Shift + 3 on Mac, or write ¤ in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+00A4 directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 00a4 on Linux, or 00a4 then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Currency Sign
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+00A4
- Windows
- Alt + 0164
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 0164 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| Mac | Option + Shift + 3 | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | ¤ | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+00A4 | CURRENCY SIGN |
Other currency symbols
¤ lives in the Latin-1 Supplement block (U+0080-U+00FF), the accented letters and common signs Western European languages needed. Within Unicode it is classified as Sc, a currency symbol. Formatting libraries recognise it when rendering money. Its bidirectional class makes it a European number terminator, so it sits beside a number without breaking its direction.
What Currency Sign is used for
¤ belongs in prose rather than in an equation. LaTeX writes it \textcurrency, after \usepackage{textcomp}, a text command, and there is no maths command for it at all: it is a sign that gets written down, not an operator that acts on anything. Putting it inside $...$ is how it comes out looking wrong.
Unicode publishes a second list of names for ¤ in CLDR, the keywords its own search data offers rather than the formal name, and it is unknown currency. That word is what somebody looking for this character is liable to type when Currency Sign is not the name they know it by, and the search on the symbol lists matches it as well as the Unicode name.
What Unicode says about Currency Sign
Unicode annotates ¤ directly. Against U+00A4 the code chart carries the note “Generic or unknown currency”. It adds: other currency symbol characters start at 20A0. That is the standard saying what the character is for, rather than an inference from its name.
The code chart points from ¤ to Dollar Sign. These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Currency Sign looks nearly right but not quite.
How Currency Sign behaves in software
¤ is East Asian Ambiguous: one column in a Western locale and two in a CJK one. That is why a table that lines up on your machine can break on somebody else's, with no change to the text at all. It carries no direction of its own, so in a line that mixes English with Arabic or Hebrew it takes the direction of the text around it rather than forcing one.
What people ask about Currency Sign
What is the currency sign for gbp?
¤ is CURRENCY SIGN, encoded at U+00A4. The Unicode code chart annotates it “Generic or unknown currency”, which is the standard's own statement of what it is for. It is distinct from dollar sign (U+0024), which the chart lists beside it precisely because they are confused for one another.
Every way to write Currency Sign
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+00A4 |
| Decimal | 164 |
| UTF-8 bytes | C2 A4 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 00 A4 |
| HTML entity | ¤ |
| HTML numeric | ¤ or ¤ |
| CSS | \00A4 |
| JavaScript | \u00A4 |
| Python | \u00A4 |
| URL-encoded | %C2%A4 |
| LaTeX, in prose | \textcurrency (needs \usepackage{textcomp}) |
| SVG | 00A4.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If ¤ arrives as ¤
That is this exact character, undamaged: its two UTF-8 bytes C2 A4 are being read one at a time as Windows-1252. The Latin-1 range is where this happens most, because it is the range every legacy system thought it already handled. Nothing is lost, and retyping will not help: the fix is at the reading end, which has to be told the text is UTF-8. An empty rectangle is the opposite complaint, and means the encoding is right and the font has no glyph for U+00A4.