General currency symbol

¤

The general currency symbol ( ¤ ), colloquially known as turtle or sputnik due to its appearance , is used in typography as a placeholder for any national currency.

It is always used when it is to be expressed that the respective national currency symbol should appear in its place, but initially irrelevant or not yet specified which it will be later. For example, in many computer operating systems, when setting, it appears whether the specific currency symbol associated with the country settings of the respective user should be displayed before or after the currency amount.

The general currency symbol is contained in Unicode as CURRENCY SIGN (U + 00A4), in HTML it can be written with & curren; or numerically with & # 164; be referenced. In the ISO-8859-1 character set as well as in some other European character sets it is also contained as the A4 character - in ISO-8859-15 , however, the euro symbol (€) is located at this code position ; the general currency symbol is not included in this character set.

The common currency symbol used to be found on the keyboards of computers , teleprinters, and electric typewriters .

It is also part of the International Reference Version (IRV) of ISO 646 , where it is in code position 24 _hex instead of the dollar sign. This variant was preferred, especially in countries of the Eastern Bloc.