Yen sign

¥
yen, yuan

The Yen sign (¥) is a currency sign used by the Chinese yuan (CNY) and the Japanese yen (JPY) currencies. This monetary symbol resembles a Latin letter Y with a double stroke. The base unit of both currencies shared the same Chinese character/Kanji (traditional Chinese: 圓; simplified Chinese: 圆; Japanese Shinjitai: 円) that means "circle". It is pronounced yuán in Mandarin Chinese and en in Standard Japanese. In mainland China, the Chinese character is more frequently written in everyday situations using the simpler character 元, which has the same pronunciation as the formal financial character 圓 in Mandarin^[1] (but not in Japanese and in some Chinese varieties).^[2] The symbol is usually placed before the value it represents, for example ¥100.

¥9 An example of a price sticker from China.

Code page 932

In the Japanese-language locales of Microsoft operating systems, the yen sign in code page 932 character encoding has the same byte value as the backslash in ASCII. It is also used wherever a backslash is used, such as the directory separator character and the general escape character,^[3] essentially making it a backslash with the appearance of a yen sign, a peculiarity that stems from JIS X 0201.

Chinese IME

Under Chinese Pinyin IMEs such as those from Microsoft or Sogou.com, typing "$" displays the double-width character "￥", which is different from single-width "¥" used in Japanese IMEs.

Unicode

The Unicode code point is U+00A5 ¥ YEN SIGN (HTML ¥ · ¥).

Additionally, there is a double-width character (￥) at code point U+FFE5 ￥ FULLWIDTH YEN SIGN (HTML ￥ · In the block "Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms") for use with wide fonts, especially east Asian fonts.

References

1. Basic accounting rules, People's Bank of China
   第二十六条 凭证、人民币“元”符号为“￥” – Article 26 receipt, the symbol of Yuan is ￥.(Chinese)
2. Such as dialects of Wu, Min Nan, Hakka and Vietnamese, see the entries for the characters 圓 and 元 in Wiktionary.
3. When is a backslash not a backslash?