The currency sign is a character used to denote an unspecified currency. It can be described as a circle the size of a lowercase character with four short radiating arms at 45°, 135°, 225° and 315°. It is raised slightly above the baseline. The character is sometimes called scarab, or the pillow symbol.
History
The symbol was first encoded for computers in 1972, as a place-holder for national currency symbols such as the dollar sign, in national variants of ASCII and the International Reference Variant. It was proposed by Italy as an alternative at 0x34. In reality, most national standards retained the dollar sign as too important.. The introduction of 8-bit encoding and the ISO/IEC 8859code pages meant that all major national currency symbols could be accommodated. When ISO 8859 was standardized, it was placed at 0xA4 in the Latin, Arabic and Hebrew character sets. There was not room for it in the Cyrillic set, it having been sacrificed for the section sign, and it was not included in all later added Latin sets. In Soviet computer systems this symbol was placed at the code point used by the dollar sign in ASCII. Latin 9 replaced it with the euro sign,, but this standard failed to gain significant acceptance given the dominance of Microsoft's Windows-1252code page. In the modern era, the Unicode standard gives each of the two symbols its own unique code point across all platforms.
Other uses
In travel agencies, where it is known as the "pillow symbol", the character appears on the specialist keyboards used with booking terminals. The symbol is used as a non-printing "end of cell" marker for tables in Microsoft Word.
Unicode
It is represented in Unicode as
Keyboard entry
The symbol is available on some keyboard layouts, for example French, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian. Otherwise it may be typed
The currency sign was once a part of the Mac OS Romancharacter set, but Apple changed the symbol at that code point to the euro sign in Mac OS 8.5. Windows character sets, the generic currency sign was retained at 0xA4 and the euro sign was introduced as a new code point, at 0x80 in the little used control-code space 0x80 to 0x9F.
