The uniqueness of the ¤ symbol

The currency symbol ( ¤ ) puzzles me. I understand its use as a generic symbol for money, but does anyone here know why, unlike other currency symbols, it is smaller than cap height and positioned above the baseline? I've dutifully included it in every font I've designed but have never understood the origins of its uniqueness.

Comments

  • Wikipedia: Generic placeholder for any actual symbol, for example in formatting pattern "12¤00"
  • French Wikipedia: Un signe fut alors (1999) prévu pour désigner un symbole monétaire générique lorsque le symbole national n’existe pas dans le jeu de caractères, le symbole : ¤.
  • Thank you, John and Yves. I don't recall ever seeing the ¤ used here in the US. Google searches told me it was a placeholder for standard currency symbols, but why an awkwardly sized and misaligned currency placeholder was needed was puzzling.

    The explanation about an obviously different placeholder character's role in legacy typesetting, where fonts didn't necessarily have all the needed characters for the job, makes sense.
  • ¤ is a zombie character. It has no real meaning and it has never been used anywhere.
  • It would be curious to find any reference to the symbol pre ISO 646 — was it invented for this purpose, or did some kind of symbol like this exist before?

  • I simply place it in the middle height of numbers. And I saw it used once in a list of exchange rates. Countries without a national symbol or no symbol in the font were represented by the generic symbol.


  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,113
    @Johannes Neumeier The use of the sign as a generic currency placeholder certainly originated in ISO 646, where in localised versions of that standard it could replace the decimal codepoint otherwise used for the dollar sign. I’ve not determined whether the shape of the sign was invented at the same time, or derived from some pre-existing graphic.
  • The form of the placeholder is arbitrary, and I don’t know where it originated.
    I once heard that it is meant to represent a coin glinting in the sun, but a quick search could neither confirm nor deny this theory.