The currency sign ¤ is a character used to denote an unspecified currency. It can be described as a circle the size of a lowercase character with four short radiating arms at 45° (NE), 135° (SE), 225° (SW) and 315° (NW). It is raised slightly above the baseline. The character is sometimes called scarab.: 5
History
The symbol was first encoded for computers in 1972, as a placeholder for national currency symbols such as the dollar sign, in national variants (ISO 646) of ASCII and the International Reference Variant. It was proposed by Italy as an alternative (to the dollar sign) at 0x24. In reality, most national standards retained the dollar sign as too important.: 6 ASCII and ISO 646 were specified as 7-bit encoding, which allowed for 96 printable characters and 32 control codes. The character is used in the GSM default 7-bit encoding as specified in 3GPP TS 23.038 / GSM 03.38 at 0x24.
The introduction of 8-bit encoding and the ISO/IEC 8859 code pages meant that...