I recently realized that my understanding of currency symbols is really not deep enough—especially for something that seems simple, like the dollar sign. In fact, there’s a lot of knowledge behind it.

I used to think that the $ symbol was exclusive to the US dollar, but I only just found out that more than 30 countries around the world use this symbol to represent their own currencies. Canada uses C$, Taiwan uses NT$, Australia uses A$—no wonder that sometimes when you look at foreign exchange quotes, things can get a bit confusing. That’s also why financial markets specifically emphasize using USD to label the dollar sign: it’s to avoid confusion.

There’s another interesting discovery: the ￥ symbol is in the same kind of situation. Both Chinese renminbi and Japanese yen use ￥, but when writing, you need to add the currency code to distinguish them—for example, CNY￥100 means renminbi, and JPY￥100 means yen. When you think about it this way, the biggest role of a currency symbol is quick identification. It saves you a lot of writing—compared with writing “40 dollars,” just writing “$40” is much more concise.

I compiled a list of commonly used country currency symbol pairs. Of course, the dollar sign is the focus, along with the British pound £, the euro € , the Japanese yen ¥, the Korean won ₩, the Indian rupee ₹, the Thai baht ฿, and so on—every country has its own symbol. On a Mac, entering the dollar sign only requires pressing Shift+4. Windows is the same, so it’s one of the simplest shortcuts. For the euro, you need to press Shift+option+2 (Mac) or Alt+E (Windows), which is a bit more complicated.

By the way, the ฿ symbol represents the Thai currency in forex, but in the cryptocurrency world it represents Bitcoin. The same symbol has completely different meanings in different markets—that’s pretty interesting. When trading forex, understanding the relationship between these currency symbols and currency pairs becomes especially important. Notations like EUR/USD and GBP/JPY are exchange-rate expressions between two currencies: the first is the base currency, and the second is the quote currency.

Sometimes I think: without these standardized rules for currency symbols, how much more difficult would international trade and investment be?