Oh my god, I just realized how confused I am about currency symbols😅 I only came to understand this while doing forex trading recently: when I see $, I can’t tell whether it means US dollars or New Taiwan dollars, and I also don’t know when to use €. Later, I spent time organizing a comparison of currency symbols used in different countries, and I found that this really is useful.

The ones that are easiest to mix up are the symbols that get reused. For example, ¥ in Japan represents the Japanese yen, while in China it stands for the renminbi. The $ sign is even more exaggerated—more than 30 countries use it. To tell them apart, you write US$ for US dollars, C$ for Canadian dollars, and NT$ for New Taiwan dollars. And then there’s the ฿ symbol: in forex it means the Thai baht, but in the crypto world it becomes Bitcoin. You really have to be careful not to read it wrong.

I put together a complete table of currency symbols and listed the codes and symbols for major countries. There’s the euro € , the British pound £ , the Japanese yen ¥ , the Korean won ₩ , and also some less common ones like the Vietnamese dong ₫ and the Turkish lira ₺ . Basically, it covers the currencies you commonly see in the forex market. If you also often get dizzy from these symbols, you can refer to it—so you don’t have to stop every time during a trade just to confirm which country’s currency it is.

Also, here’s a small tip: there are shortcut keys to input these symbols quickly on your keyboard. On Mac, the euro is Shift+Option+2, and the pound is Option+3. On Windows, the euro is Alt+E and the pound is Alt+L. Once you learn these, typing the symbols is much faster. Since there are so many currency pairs involved in forex trading, mastering this basic knowledge of symbols and how to input them can really improve your efficiency. How do you usually remember these different symbols?