I just realized I’ve been using the $ symbol a bit chaotically, so I thought I’d organize it. The meaning of the $ symbol isn’t that simple—it’s not just U.S. dollars. More than 30 countries around the world use it. For example, New Taiwan Dollars, Canadian Dollars, and Australian Dollars all use $. No wonder sometimes I get confused when I look at trading pairs.

Later, I found out that the way to tell them apart is actually quite simple. Write U.S. dollars as US$, write New Taiwan Dollars as NT$, and Hong Kong dollars as HK$—then it’s clear. The most common ones also include the euro symbol €, the British pound symbol £, and the Japanese yen symbol ¥. These ones aren’t as easy to mix up. Interestingly, the ¥ symbol in Japan represents the Japanese yen, while in China it represents the renminbi, so sometimes people write CNY¥ or JPY¥ to distinguish them.

Here’s a fun fact: in forex, the symbol ฿ stands for the Thai baht, but in cryptocurrency it represents Bitcoin—completely different things. If you often deal with forex or international transfers, learning to quickly recognize what each country’s $ symbol means is really useful. It can save you a lot of time confirming currency pairs. For example, EUR/USD is the euro against the U.S. dollar, and GBP/JPY is the British pound against the Japanese yen. The one in front is called the base currency, and the one after the slash is called the quote currency.

Have you ever gotten confused by currency symbols before?