# Why is there no cent symbol?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-there-no-cent-symbol/160145>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [March 9, 2003, 9:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-there-no-cent-symbol/160145 "2003-03-09T21:18:42Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\
**Post date:** [March 11, 2003, 6:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-there-no-cent-symbol/160145/41 "2003-03-11T18:41:54Z")

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**AHunter3** ’s symbol displays as the “unprintable character square” on my browser.

In the charmap.exe program, the square root symbol is listed as Unicode 221A. I am pasting that in here, “ã”

When pasted in, it looked good, however, on preview, I see that the character is, apparently, a double-byte character that presents a no-print square followed by a lower-case “a” with a carat. (And that is just in preview; who knows how it will display to the Teeeming Millions when it is posted.) I do not know whether there is a way to tell the browser to recognize double-byte characters on the fly (_i.e._ without programming a routine to handle it), so I suspect that the square root character is still unavailable for general use.

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**Author:** ![Achernar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e274bd/32.png) [@Achernar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Achernar)\
**Post date:** [March 11, 2003, 6:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-there-no-cent-symbol/160145/42 "2003-03-11T18:53:28Z")

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You can get Unicode characters from the hex by doing something like this:

√

becomes…

√

Looks like a checkmark on my browser (Netscape 7).

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**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\
**Post date:** [March 11, 2003, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-there-no-cent-symbol/160145/43 "2003-03-11T20:09:51Z")

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**tomndebb’s** Unicode character come through on my browser as the trademark symbol  followed by the a with tilde (ã) between straight quotation marks –

end result “ã”

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**Author:** ![Balthisar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/balthisar/32/2825_2.png) [@Balthisar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Balthisar)\
**Post date:** [March 12, 2003, 11:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-there-no-cent-symbol/160145/44 "2003-03-12T11:42:37Z")

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It’s all character encoding. **Achernar** ’s checkmark looks okay on Win2K/Mozilla.

If you have a halfway decent browser, you should be able to manually change the encoding. Look for “character coding” or “coding” or whatnot.

If I look at the source code for this very page (you know, this one you’re reading) there’s no character coding expressed at all. Mozilla is showing it as Western ISO 8859-1, but I don’t know if that’s “auto detected” or just a default for non-specified pages.

If I hope over to Google, right away the page source reveals “charset=UTF-8” and Mozilla indicates it as Unicode. UTF8 is a hybrid kind of Unicode, whereby a character is represented by either one or two bytes. (off topic explanation of all this deleted)

In any case, if it’s not outside the realm of GQ (i.e., not considered a survey) we could all change our encodings and report what we see here for all the above glyphs.

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**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\
**Post date:** [March 12, 2003, 12:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-there-no-cent-symbol/160145/45 "2003-03-12T12:00:38Z")

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Mozilla on Linux shows **AHunter** ’s character as a question mark, which is the equivalent of the NPC box. In fact, the only of **AHunter** ’s characters to come through is the ã.

**Achernar** ’s character comes through fine, however.

And Mozilla, being a very good browser, allows you to select character encodings from a wide range of possible options. 😃

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