Yen and yuan sign (¥)

How to read it

Unicode names the character YEN SIGN (U+00A5), with “yuan sign (renminbi)” as its other name, and notes that its glyph may have one crossbar or two but that the official symbol in Japan and China has two. Its chapter on currency symbols adds that some glyph standards once gave a single crossbar, notably the OCR-A standard ISO 1073-1:1976, which influenced the glyph in several character sets from China. Since the sign alone doesn’t say which of the two currencies is meant, the ISO 4217 codes tell them apart: JPY for the yen of Japan, CNY for the yuan renminbi of China.

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円 and 元

In Japanese and Chinese text the currency is also written with a character. Unicode notes that in native context specific ideographs may be used for these currencies, and lists 円 (U+5186) for the yen and 元 (U+5143) for the yuan, also used for the yen and the won; they write the words yen (or en) and yuan. Chinese has characters for smaller units too: 角 jiǎo, a tenth of a yuan, and 分 fēn, a tenth of a jiǎo.

A backslash that shows as ¥

On a computer set to Japanese, the backslash can appear as ¥. Michael Kaplan of Microsoft explained in 2005 that on the Japanese code page 932 the byte 0x5C, a backslash elsewhere, is the yen sign, and that Japanese fonts show the currency sign in place of the backslash when the system locale is Japanese. It still works as a backslash in file paths. Korean systems do the same with the won sign.