I just recently discovered that currency symbols have so many nuances 😅. I used to think $ was just US dollars, but that’s not the case at all. More than 30 countries use the $ symbol—no wonder foreign exchange trading can easily get confusing.

After looking at currency symbols from different countries, I found that the USD symbol is $. But Canada, Australia, and New Zealand also use $, so they write C$, A$, and NZ$ to distinguish them. The euro is €, the British pound is £, and the Japanese yen is ¥—these are still fairly easy to recognize. The most interesting one is the ฿ symbol: in Thailand it represents the Thai baht, but in cryptocurrency it means Bitcoin—completely different things.

If you’re a forex trader, seeing EUR/USD lets you know it’s the exchange rate between the euro and the US dollar. The one in front is called the base currency, and the one after it is called the quote currency. I think the most practical are those shortcut keys: on Mac, pressing Shift+4 can type the US dollar symbol, and on Windows it’s also Shift+4, which is much faster than manually looking up a symbol table. On Mac, the euro is Shift+option+2—this is one I use a lot.

How do you usually distinguish these symbols day to day? Or do you just type the currency codes directly?