Dollar sign


The dollar sign or peso sign is a symbol used to indicate the units of various currencies around the world, including the peso and the US dollar. The symbol can interchangeably have one or two vertical strokes. In common usage, the sign appears to the left of the amount specified, e.g. "$1", read as "one dollar".

Origin

There are several hypotheses about the origin of the dollar sign. It is first attested in Spanish American, American, Canadian, Mexican, and other British business correspondence in the 1770s referring to the Spanish American peso, also known as "Spanish dollar" or "piece of eight" in America, which provided the model for the currency that the United States adopted in 1792 and the larger coins of the new Spanish American republics, such as the Mexican peso, Peruvian real, and Bolivian sol coins. This explanation holds that the sign grew out of the Spanish and Spanish American scribal abbreviation "pˢ" for pesos. A study of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century manuscripts shows that the s gradually came to be written over the p, developing into a close equivalent to the "$" mark. A variation of this hypothesis derives the sign from a combination of the Greek character "psi" and "S".

Pillars of Hercules

Another hypothesis holds that the sign is derived from the symbolic representation of the Pillars of Hercules. This representation can have either a banner separately around each pillar, or a banner curling between them, as in the Spanish coat of arms.
The symbol was adopted by Charles V and was part of his coat of arms representing Spain's American possessions. The symbol was later stamped on coins minted in gold and silver. The Spanish dollar depicted the pillars over two hemispheres and a small "S"-shaped ribbon around each. They were spread throughout America, Europe, and Asia. According to this theory, traders wrote signs that had this symbol, and this in turn developed into a simple S with two vertical bars.
With the Coinage Act of 1792, the United States Congress created the US dollar, defining it to have "the value of a Spanish milled dollar as the same is now current" but continued to use a variety of foreign coins until the Coinage Act of 1857 declared them illegal. These US dollar coins did not have any dollar symbol.
Mexico continued to use the Spanish dollar until after the Mexican War of Independence.

Drawn with two vertical lines

Several alternative hypotheses relate specifically to the dollar sign drawn with two vertical lines. A dollar sign with two vertical lines could have started off as a monogram of "USA" used on money bags issued by the United States Mint. The letters U and S superimposed resemble the historical double-stroke dollar sign. The bottom of the U disappears into the bottom curve of the S, leaving two vertical lines. Dr. James Alton James was a professor of history at Northwestern University from 1897 to 1935, and he postulated that the symbol with two strokes was an adapted design of patriot Robert Morris in 1778.
The $1 United States Note issued by the United States in 1869 included a symbol consisting of a partially overlapping U and S, with one of the bars of the U intersecting the S, as well as the double-stroke dollar sign in the legal warning against forgery. Another hypothesis is that it is derived from the symbol used on a German Thaler. A similar symbol of superimposing S and I or J was used to denote the German Joachimsthaler which appeared in the 1686 edition of An Introduction to Merchants' Accounts by John Collins.

Use in computer software

Because of its use in early American computer applications such as business accounting, the dollar sign is almost universally present in computer character sets, and thus has been appropriated for many purposes unrelated to money in programming languages and command languages.

Encoding

The dollar sign "$" has Unicode code point U+0024.
There are no separate characters for one- and two-line variants. This is typeface-dependent.
There are also three other code points that originate from other East Asian standards: the Taiwanese small form variant, the CJK fullwidth form, and the Japanese emoji. The glyphs for these code points are typically larger or smaller than the primary code point, but the difference is mostly aesthetic or typographic, and the meanings of the symbols are the same.
However, for usage as the special character in various computing applications, U+0024 is typically the only code that is recognized.

Programming languages

> touch my_first_file
> echo "This is my file." > !$
In addition to those countries of the world that use dollars or pesos, a number of other countries use the $ symbol to denote their currencies, including:
An exception is the Philippine peso, whose sign is written as ₱.
The dollar sign is also still sometimes used to represent the Malaysian ringgit, though its official use to represent the currency has been discontinued since 1993.
Some currencies use the cifrão, similar to the dollar sign, but always with two strokes:
However, in Argentina, the $ sign is always used for pesos, and if they want to indicate dollars, they always write U$S 5 or US$5.
In the United States, Mexico, Australia, Argentina, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Pacific Island nations, and English-speaking Canada, the dollar or peso symbol precedes the number. Five dollars or pesos is written and printed as $5, whereas five cents is written as 5¢. In French-speaking Canada, the dollar symbol usually appears after the number.

In games and virtual worlds

Some virtual world and gaming platforms have used the $ symbol to refer to their own virtual currencies, for example:
The symbol is sometimes used derisively to indicate greed or excess money such as in "Micro$oft", "George Luca$", "Lar$ Ulrich", "Di$ney", "Chel$ea" and "GW$"; or supposed overt Americanisation as in "$ky". The dollar sign is also used intentionally to stylize names such as A$AP Rocky, Ke$ha, and Ty Dolla $ign or words such as ¥€$. In 1872, Ambrose Bierce referred to the California Governor as $tealand Landford.
In Scrabble notation, a dollar sign is placed after a word to indicate that it is valid according to the North American word lists, but not according to the British word lists.
The dollar sign was used as a letter in Turkmen alphabet from 1993 to 1999.