¥

The yen and yuan sign (¥) is a currency sign used to represent the base units of the Japanese yen (JPY) and the Chinese yuan (CNY, the primary unit of the renminbi) when writing in the Latin script. The character resembles a capital letter Y 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.

History

In Japan, after the institution of the New Currency Act of 1871, the yen was referred to in Latin-script documents by its full name or abbreviated with a capital "Y." One of the earliest known uses of ¥ appears in J. Twizell Wawn's Japanese Municipal Government With an Account of the Administration of the City of Kobe, published in 1899. Usage of the sign increased in the early 20th century, primarily in Western English-speaking countries, and later became common in Japan as well.

Unicode and Encoding

• Unicode code point: U+00A5 ¥ YEN SIGN (¥)
• Fullwidth variant: U+FFE5 ￥ FULLWIDTH YEN SIGN (used with wide East Asian fonts)
• In ISO/IEC 8859-1 (Latin 1), code point A5 is assigned to ¥.
• In JIS X 0201 (and its extension Shift JIS), code point 0x5C is assigned to the yen sign. This is the same code point used for the backslash ($ in ASCII. Consequently, on Japanese-locale versions of Microsoft Windows, the backslash character is displayed as a yen sign (e.g., C:¥ instead of C:\), and the escape character appears as ¥n.

Native Characters

In East Asian scripts, distinct CJK characters are used for each currency:

• Japan: 円 (shinjitai)
• China: 元 or 圆 (simplified)
• Taiwan/Hong Kong/Macau: 圓 or 元 (traditional)

Other Uses

• In the 1993 Turkmen orthography, the yen sign was used as the capital form of ÿ, representing the sound /j/. It was replaced with Ý in 1999.
• The symbol strongly resembles the unit insignia of the World War II German Army's 17th Panzer Division.