I just recently figured out that the question of what currency the symbol ¥ represents actually has no absolute answer. The same symbol can mean different money in different places. Japan uses ¥ to represent the Japanese yen, while China uses ¥ to represent the Renminbi, so sometimes it’s written as CNY¥100 or JPY¥100 to distinguish.

In fact, the biggest role of currency symbols is to make it convenient and fast to recognize. You don’t have to write “United States dollar” every time—just type the $ symbol directly. But the problem is that the $ symbol is used in more than 30 countries worldwide: the United States, Canada, New Taiwan Dollar, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia are all among them. So sometimes prefixes are added to tell them apart, like US$, NT$, HK$.

There’s also an interesting case: the ฿ symbol represents the Thai baht in the foreign exchange market, but in cryptocurrencies it represents Bitcoin—completely different things. If you’re doing forex trading or international investing, knowing these symbols can definitely speed up recognition, especially when you look at currency pairs like EUR/USD and GBP/JPY, because you can immediately react to which currencies’ exchange rates are involved.

Some common symbol shortcut keys are also pretty useful. For example, on Mac you can type the euro symbol € by pressing Shift+Option+2, and on Windows you can do the same with Alt+E. The British pound is Option+3 (Mac) or Alt+L (Windows). If you often need to input these symbols, remembering the shortcut keys really can save you a lot of time.