I only recently realized that my understanding of currency symbols from different countries is a bit mixed up, especially when I look at foreign exchange quotes—I sometimes can’t tell what’s what. Later, I understood that the purpose of these symbols is simply to let us quickly recognize the currencies of different countries. Compared with writing “40 US dollar,” writing “$40” is definitely more convenient.

What’s most interesting is that the same symbol can represent different currencies in different countries. For example, the “$” symbol is used by more than 30 countries: the United States uses US$, Taiwan uses NT$, Canada uses C$, and Hong Kong uses HK$. They look similar, but they’re actually quite different. Also, “￥” represents the Japanese yen in Japan and the Chinese renminbi in China, which is why you need to write CNY￥ or JPY￥ to tell them apart.

In my work, I often need to use currency symbols from various countries, so I wrote down some common shortcuts. The euro symbol € on Mac is Shift+option+2, and on Windows it’s Alt+E. The US dollar $ is Shift+4 on both systems. The British pound £ on Mac is option+3. These shortcuts really save a lot of time.

Here’s an interesting piece of trivia: in foreign exchange, the “฿” symbol stands for the Thai baht, but in the world of cryptocurrencies it stands for Bitcoin—one symbol, two completely different meanings. If you want to truly master foreign exchange trading, understanding the meaning and usage of currency symbols from different countries is still pretty important.