I only found out while doing forex trading recently that what seem like simple things—like the symbols for the US dollar and the euro—actually involve a lot of knowledge behind them. Especially when you see the $ symbol, you really have no idea whether it means US dollars, Canadian dollars, or New Taiwan dollars, and it’s very easy to get confused.

In fact, the purpose of currency symbols is to identify the currency quickly, so you don’t have to write out the full currency code every time. Compared with writing “40 US dollar,” writing “$40” is definitely more concise. But the problem is that the US dollar symbol $ is used in more than 30 countries around the world, so sometimes you need to add prefixes to tell them apart—for example, US$ means US dollars, NT$ means New Taiwan dollars, and HK$ means Hong Kong dollars.

I put together a reference chart of commonly used currency symbols. The euro is €, the British pound is £, and both the Japanese yen and the Chinese yuan use ¥ (but you need to distinguish them using CNY and JPY). The Korean won is ₩, and the Thai baht is ฿. There’s also something interesting: in cryptocurrency, ฿ represents Bitcoin, but in the forex market, it’s the Thai currency.

If you often need to enter these symbols, on Mac you can type the euro with Shift+option+2, and the US dollar symbol with Shift+4. On Windows, the euro is Alt+E, and the US dollar symbol is also Shift+4. These shortcuts can really save a lot of time.

In forex trading, the most common thing is currency pairs—for example, EUR/USD represents the exchange rate between the euro and the US dollar. The one in front is called the base currency, and the one after is called the quote currency. Understanding these symbols and codes is definitely helpful for trading or international investing; at the very least, you won’t get confused just because you see the US dollar symbol.