Recently, while trading forex, I found that my understanding of various currency symbols still isn’t deep enough, so I went ahead and organized the most common ones.

When it comes to currency symbols, they’re basically visual shorthand that quickly helps us recognize the currencies of different countries. Symbols like $, €, £, ¥ let us identify which currency pair is involved in seconds—much faster than reading the full currency code. Writing $40 for US dollars is definitely more convenient than writing 40 US dollar.

What’s interesting is that the same symbol can represent different currencies in different places. ¥ is Japanese yen in Japan, but renminbi in China—so if you want to distinguish them, you’d write CNY¥ or JPY¥. The $ symbol is even more “over the place”: more than 30 countries use it. It can mean US$ for US dollars, NT$ for New Taiwan dollars, C$ for Canada, and A$ for Australia—without context, it’s easy to mix them up.

Typing these currency symbols on the keyboard also has shortcuts. For Mac users, to type the euro symbol, press Shift+option+2; for Windows, press Alt+E. On both systems, the dollar symbol is Shift+4. For the British pound symbol, it’s Option+3 on Mac and Alt+L on Windows. For the yen symbol, Mac users can just press Option+Y.

There’s also an interesting detail: ฿ in forex represents Thailand’s baht, but in the cryptocurrency space it becomes the symbol for bitcoin—meaning the same symbol has completely different meanings.

In forex, currency pairs are the exchange rates between two currencies. For example, EUR/USD is the euro against the US dollar. The currency in front is called the base currency, and the one after is called the quote currency. Once you understand these currency symbols and codes, you’re less likely to make mistakes when trading.