I’ve seen the ¤ character (aka scarab) used as a symbol for currencies that didn’t have their own. Whereas the dollar has the $ and the pound has the £, some currencies do not have symbols like that, so when they are referred to, ¤ is used. My question is, why? When did that originate? Does ¤ have any other usage?
I’m sorry if the character does not appear on your screen. I think it’s in the ASCII standard, and it appears fine on my Win95 PC, but YMMV.
Actually, it appears to be hex code F4, which is beyond the standard seven bit ASCII range, and displays as an n with a tilde in my MKS toolkit utilities. It displays as the “scarab” you describe in my browser and in notepad. Curiously, in ISO-Latin 8859 that SHOULD be an o with a circumflex, and if coded as ô that’s how it displays in the browser.
Character sets are truly a morass.
OOPS. Pardon me, that was 244 OCTAL! That corresponds to 164 decimal, or hex A4. Still above 7 bit ASCII, but that does correspond to your “scarab” in ISO-Latin 8859. Some character tables actually refer to it as the “currency” symbol.
My understanding is that it’s only when the real currency symbol is not part of the character set you’re using.
[HIJACK]Speaking of all this, does anybody know from where the symbols for dollars and pounds, et cetera come? An “S” with two lines through it seems pretty random.[/HIJACK]
From http://www.eslcafe.com/discussion/dz8/index.cgi?read=953 (copied here only because it is only availible through Google’s cached page, the actual address is a 404 now…)
Origin of the Dollar Sign
“It is sometimes said that the dollar sign’s origin is a narrow “U” superimposed over a wide “S”, “U.S.” being short for “United States.” This is wrong, and the correct explanation also tells why the sign is used both for dollars and for pesos in various countries. The explanation is not widely known, maybe because not many people would think to look for it in _A History of Mathematical Notations, Volume II: Notations Mainly in Higher Mathematics_ by Florian Cajori (published in 1929 and reprinted in 1952, by Open Court Press). Cajori acknowledges the "U.S." theory and a number of others, but, after examining many 18th-century manuscripts, finds that there is simply no evidence to support those theories.
Spanish pesos were also called piastres, Spanish dollars, and pieces of eight. And they were circulated in many parts of the world, much as U.S. dollars are today. The coins were so well known that, when the U.S. got around to issuing its own silver coinage (U.S. dollar coins first appeared in 1794), it simply replicated the Spanish unit's weight and hence value, and even one of its names; so it was natural to use the same symbol.
Since three of the four names given above for the Spanish dollar start with p (and pluralize with s), it was natural for abbreviations like p and ps to be used. Sometimes ps was written as P with a superscript s. The superscript was a common way of rendering abbreviated endings of words -- we see vestiges of it today in the way some people write "10th". Now, what happens if you write P with a superscript s *fast*, because it's part of a long document that you have to hand-write because you can't wait for the typewriter to be invented, let alone the word-processor? Naturally, you join the letters. Well, now look at the top part of the resulting symbol. There's the sign! Reduce the P to a single stroke and you have the form of the with a double vertical; omit it altogether and you get the single vertical.
And yes, both these forms are original. Cajori reproduces 14 signs from a diary written in 1776; 11 of them have the single stroke, which was the more common form to the end of the century, and 3 have the double stroke.
Although the $ sign originally referred to a Spanish coin, it was the revolting British -> American colonists who made the transition from ps to the new sign. (This is apparently also why we write 1 instead of 1; it mimics the British use of the pound sign.) So, while it did not originally refer to the U.S. dollar, the symbol does legitimately claim its origins in that country”
From this link.
Couldn’t comment on the veracity, but it sounds plausible.
But as for the pound sign, I’ve come up with nothing.
I believe it comes from the Latin “librum”, the same place the abbreviation for weight-unit pound (lb.) comes from. It’s obviously a stylized “L”.
Tsk tsk tsk…
You guys really should check with Cecil first…