What is "currency sign"

n. 1 Any graphic symbol used as a shorthand for a currency's name, especially in reference to amounts of money. 2 (context computing text encoding English) A specific graphic symbol (¤) which replaced the dollar sign ($) in some international text encoding systems, starting with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO%20646.

The currency sign (¤) is a character used to denote an unspecified currency. It is often used in place of a symbol that is not present in the font in use; for example, in place of the colón (₡). It can be described as a circle the size of a lowercase character with four short radiating arms at 45° (NE), 135° (SE), 225°, (SW) and 315° (NW). It is raised slightly above the baseline. It is represented in Unicode as .

The currency sign was once a part of the Mac OS Roman character set, but Apple changed the symbol at that code point to the euro sign (€) in Mac OS 8.5. In non-Unicode Windows character sets, the euro sign was introduced as a new code point. In the Unicode character set, each of the two symbols has its own unique code point across all platforms.

The symbol is available on some keyboard layouts, for example French, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and Estonian.