I just realized that the matter of currency symbols across different countries is way more complicated than I thought. Especially when you’re doing international transactions or checking forex charts, if you’re not clear about what these symbols stand for, it’s easy to get into trouble.

The easiest ones to mix up are a few of those symbols. For example, the ¥ symbol: in Japan, it means the Japanese yen; in China, it means the Chinese renminbi. When writing, you need to add the country code to tell them apart—CNY¥100 and JPY¥100 mean completely different things. The $ symbol is even more confusing. It’s used in 30+ countries worldwide, so the dollar, Canadian dollar, Australian dollar, Hong Kong dollar, and New Taiwan dollar are all written as $. To distinguish them clearly, you have to write them like US$, C$, A$, HK$, and so on.

The standard way to write currency symbols by country is actually like this: the US dollar (USD) uses $, the euro (EUR) uses €, the British pound (GBP) uses £, the Japanese yen (JPY) uses ¥, the Chinese renminbi (CNY) uses ¥ or yuan, and then there are Indian rupees (₹), Korean won (₩), Thai baht (฿), and so on. If you often look at forex charts, currency pairs like EUR/USD and GBP/JPY are common. The first one is the base currency, the second one is the quote currency, indicating the exchange rate.

There are also keyboard shortcuts for typing these currency symbols. On Mac, the euro is Shift+option+2, and the pound is Option+3. On Windows, euro is Alt+E, and pound is Alt+L. For the dollar sign, both systems use Shift+4.

It’s basically just a matter of using them a few times to remember them—especially when investing or making international payments, getting clear on currency symbols can save you a lot of hassle. Which symbol do you use most often?